With two new books in print to follow his 2005 bestseller Born to Kvetch, and enjoying a new popularity with Jewish audiences who delight in his erudite knowledge of Yiddish, Toronto writer Michael Wex can no longer be said to be languishing in obscurity. In the round fullness of middle age, the Lethbridge-born Yiddishist put…
Category: Yiddish
Melech Grafstein and Sholem Aleichem
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It was just over a century ago, in 1908, that a young Jewish lad in Warsaw, Poland, had a brief personal encounter with Sholom Aleichem that he would remember for the rest of his life. Melech Grafstein, then a 15-year-old Bundist and Yiddish theatre devotee, had earlier seen him reading on stage and also davening…
Kreitman’s Dance of the Demons
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“I do not know of a single woman in Yiddish literature who wrote better than she did,” Isaac Bashevis Singer once commented about the little-known novelist and story writer Esther Kreitman, whose 1936 book, The Dance of the Demons, has just been reissued by the Feminist Press of New York. In truth, Singer might have…
More Wit & Wisdom from Michael Wex
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Michael Wex, the Toronto writer, raconteur and Yiddishist whose previous non-fiction book Born to Kvetch climbed to the top of the bestseller lists, now presents us with an equally learned and funny manual about how to be a human being — humane, considerate, and wise enough to do the right thing. How to Be a…
A Trove of Yiddish Letters
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North York resident Debbie Rose, who has been fervently researching her family tree for the past several years, has found a large trove of old Yiddish letters of historic significance that she hopes to get translated into English. The letters, some dating back to the end of the 19th century, belong to a relative in…
Through the Eyes of The Eagle
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When Russian-Polish immigrant Hirsch Wolofsky decided to launch a Yiddish daily newspaper in Montreal in August 1907, it was clearly an idea whose time had come. Impoverished Russian-Jewish masses, fleeing pogroms, revolution and war, had begun settling in Montreal in record numbers. Strangers in a strange land, they read New York Yiddish papers like the…
