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…]
by Lawrence Bush on April 7, 2012
Lampoon by Lawrence Bush
Margret Elizabeth and Hans Augusto Rey, the creators of Curious George, became American citizens on this date in 1946. They were German Jews who met in Brazil and married in 1935. Living and creating children’s books in Paris, they fled that city by bicycle at the outbreak of World War II, carrying with them the illustrated manuscripts of their first Curious George books, which were published in New York in 1941. The Reys wrote seven Curious George stories collaboratively, with Hans doing the illustrating and Margret most of the writing, but only “H.A. Rey” was bylined on the covers of the books until much later. Their books have been translated into fifteen languages and have sold some 20 million copies. In 1989, Margret Rey established the Curious George Foundation to foster children’s creativity and prevent cruelty to animals. A creative telling of their escape from Nazism can be viewed at the Jewish Museum website.
“We loved monkeys, and the first thing we did when we went to a new city was to visit the zoo. Hans was the artist, a genius and a dreamer who loved animals. I was the midwife. I’d write the text and supervise the drawings.” —Margret Rey
by Lawrence Bush on March 18, 2012
Philip Roth, one of America’s most powerful and celebrated novelists, was born in Newark, New Jersey on this date in 1933. Roth’s twenty-seven novels range from out-and-out political satire (Our Gang, about Richard Nixon being picketed by the Boy Scouts of America) to surrealism (The Breast, about a professor who becomes a giant breast) to imaginary history (The Plot Against America, about the election of Charles Lindbergh to the Presidency) to profound meditations on Jewish identity and male sexuality (The Professor of Desire and Portnoy’s Complaint, to name just two). His two non-fictions include Patrimony, a profound telling of his father’s death. Roth is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Award, and many other prizes. He has been a highly disciplined and productive writer who made relatively few public appearances until the past two decades. A close reading of his work reveals an ever-widening capacity to convey the humanity of both men and women, old and young. His sentences are gorgeous, his humor uproarious, and his portrayals of sexual desire and its upheavals are unmatched.
“Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.” —Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
by Lawrence Bush on March 5, 2012
Ayn Rand (Alisa Rosenbaum), Russian-born author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, among other philosophical novels and screenplays, died on this date in 1982. Rand developed the philosophy of Objectivism, which advocated human reason as the path to knowledge, disdained religious faith, emphasized the quest for individual happiness, and promoted laissez-faire capitalism as the least coercive, most liberatory economic system. She lived in Russia during the revolution and studied philosophy and history before coming to the U.S. in 1925 and establishing herself as a moderately successful screenwriter. The Fountainhead, a dystopian novel about totalitarianism, became a bestseller in 1943 and launched her career as a pop-culture oracle; the book has sold over 3.5 million copies. Rand soon became a Republican Party activist and a very vocal, very visible anti-Communist. Her novels were generally panned by critics, even in the rightwing press, yet her influence as an against-the-grain conservative and writer who romanticized individualism grew by leaps and bounds. “Without Ayn Rand, says David Nolan, a founder of the Libertarian Party, “the libertarian movement would not exist.” Her fiction is often read by young people and has been described by Rand’s biographer, Jennifer Burns, as “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.” In 1991, a survey for the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club found Atlas Shrugged (1957) to be second only to the Bible as “the most influential book” in club members’ lives.
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” —Ayn Rand
