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Yiddish Book Center

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Focus On A Bittersweet Time

The end of Sukkos is a bittersweet time. The holiday, by its nature, is a happy occasion. It’s a harvest celebration (always a party) and, according to tradition, the most joyous time of the year. For all the joy, however, there is sadness. After the cascade of fall holidays, there are no more until Hanukkah. (No more Jewish ones, at least.) In the northeastern United States where the Yiddish Book Center is located, we may be enjoying the brilliant fall foliage, but winter is coming. For Yiddish-speaking Jews this bittersweetness, a combined sense of beginning and ending, of renewal and senescence, has been amply expressed in literature and art. Here are a few of our favorites.

אויסגעקליבן Handpicked Randi Silnutzer

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Each month, the Yiddish Book Center asks a member of our staff or a friend to select favorite stories, books, interviews, or articles from our online collections. This month, we’re excited to share with you picks by Randi Silnutzer, the director of operations at the Yiddish Book Center.

Adrienne Cooper: Song-teaching in the Former Soviet Union

In this excerpt from the Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, legendary Yiddish singer Adrienne Cooper z”l talks about the experience of teaching Yiddish music and culture in the former Soviet Union. She speaks about how the participants had just a “fine thread” that connected them to their history, describes how thirsty they were for learning more, and notes that “had our families not emigrated, we would have been these people.”

Collecting Yiddish Zines

The Center’s new permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture, not only looks at the geographic range of Yiddish but also at its expression across time periods and genres. The curators were very intentional in including a collection of Yiddish “zines”—contemporary, often self-published booklets of literature and art. In this article, former Yiddish Book Center fellow Maya Gonzalez explores the variety of themes in Yiddish zines. It’s a perfect example—with striking visuals—of Yiddish creative expression continuing to adapt and thrive in the present day.

Socalled Demo (Yidstock video)

I happened to be in attendance at this workshop in 2008, where Josh Dolgin (aka Socalled) talked about his early interest in hip-hop music and how he began to discover and incorporate old recordings of Yiddish theater and klezmer music. Right there on the stage, he showed us how he took samples from different recordings and looped them in with a hip-hop beat and his own singing to create something that was both wildly new and historically resonant.

Reading the Readers

In the Center’s membership department, we regularly receive calls from long-time supporters who want to make sure we know they’ve been “a member since the very beginning.” Many of them have also donated their own Yiddish books or the contents of their parents’ or grandparents’ libraries. This “From the Vault” article takes a look at the stories behind the books in our collection and provides a visceral feel for how deeply personal they truly are.

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