Read this article in Yiddish
On Sunday, May 30, a number of renowned singers and actors will perform songs by the great Yiddish poet, Itzik Manger, during an online literary event celebrating 120 years since his birth.
The program, “Itzik Manger and the Golden Peacock”, will be in Yiddish with English subtitles and will be streamed via Zoom at 2:00 PM EDT. The celebration is sponsored by the League for Yiddish, the Congress for Jewish Culture, Yung Yiddish, Ot Azoy, and the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language.
The golden peacock mentioned in the event’s title refers to an image which appears frequently in Manger’s work and has come to serve as a symbol for Yiddish literary creativity in general.
For Barney Zumoff, a giant and a mentsch forward.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forward.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Words Reaching for Life: Yiddish Culture in Displaced Persons Camps (Hebrew)
Ella Florsheim
Published by the Zalman Shazar Center and Yad Vashem Publications, 2020, 344 pp.
My father was among the 250,000 refugees who lived in Jewish displaced persons camps throughout Germany and Austria after World War II. But unlike other 15-year olds, he had arrived in the camp alone, having left his parents in Poland. Suddenly he was free as a bird, with no parental supervision. Although he was technically a detainee in the British and American refugee camps, his stories of those days were filled with a spirit of freedom and joy. He managed to learn a little Hebrew and even a trade; he became a carpenter. He joined the religious Zionist youth movement, Bnei Akiv, played soccer and apparently sowed some wild oats. I’ll probably never hear the juicy details of his escapades because, let’s face it, how can a father talk to his son about that?
Like mushrooms after the rain: The flourishing of Jewish culture in the D P camps forward.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forward.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Yakob Basner may be 93 years-old, but that doesn’t stop him from doing a job he loves: teaching Yiddish. Since immigrating to Southern California from the former Soviet Union in 1980, Basner has taught the
mame-loshn to over 2,000 people.
“If you want to understand the history of the Jewish people, you need to understand Yiddish because for many of them, this was their language,” he said.
The pandemic has, oddly enough, breathed new life into the old language. In Southern California, where people live dispersed over wide areas and where traffic makes a five-mile trip into an overnight, Zoom has been a godsend. His beginners classes at the Workers Circle have attracted even more students than before.