Yiddish Book Center

This kit, on the Center’s site for teachers, offers resources for teaching a famous and unforgettable poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” by Adrienne Rich. As the kit, by Joshua Logan Wall, explains, a few years before she wrote it Rich translated Yiddish women’s poetry—and so the poem’s description of a salvage operation might even be read as describing her dive into Yiddish literary history.

More than once during the recent months of quarantine have the opening lines of Jacob Glatstein’s famous poem “A gute nakht, velt” (“Goodnight, World”) been on my mind: “Good night, wide world. / Big, stinking world. / Not you, but I, slam the gate.” To read the original, written for a very different moment of historical tragedy and trauma, see Glatstein’s 1943 book Gedenkenlider.

Yosef Haim Yerushalmi was one of the most influential Jewish historians of recent times, and though I have read his work I had never heard his voice until listening to recordings of his lectures at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal. This lecture, telling the life story of the poet Yehuda Ha-Levi, includes as a forshpayz Yerushalmi’s explanation of how a New York-born, Ashkenazi Jew like him came to have the name “Yerushalmi.”