Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Three Foundations (Sholem Aleichem and the Yiddish Literary Tradition)
[ . . . ] Why is fame accorded to this particular individual, far and beyond his own time and place and why does he continue to capture new readers both in the original and in translation? [ . . . P…
1948. A Soldier’s Tale: The Bloody Road to Jerusalem
At five o’clock in the morning our commanders stormed into the dormitories to wake us. No morning gymnastics. We are in a high state of alert. Our comrades who were on night duty report…
The Pile
The next day Marcel Schwartz registered at the labor exchange. [ . . . ]
Ten days later he heard clearly and explicitly: Marcel Schwartz! With trembling hands, he took his work notice, went home to…
Early in the Summer of 1970
I believe I ought to go over the moment when I learned of his death once more.
A summer morning, the sky wide, June, last days of the school year. I rise late, faintly stunned, straight into the…
Sprinkler Hora
A gush of joy in the pipe,
The pipes, the arteries of the Negev,
This is the course of the song,
From the faucet to the clod
The water of the depths ascends.
A pump means bread!
Negev, Negev, what’s…
The Voice
On a forgone and alien diaspora night,
Far, far in the midst of childhood,
A heavy bottomless darkness closed upon me,
Surrounding me in fear and horror.
Somewhere in Yemen in the district of…
Twelve Faces of the Emerald
I am exceedingly green: chill green.
What have I to do
with all the greenishness of chance?
I am the green-source, the green-self,
one and incomparable.
Letter to an Arab Friend
The year was 1933: one automobile picked us up to take us both from Jerusalem to Haifa over the road which passes through Nablus. The boat which brought us to Marseilles allowed us to discover for the…
Aaron Hart and His Children
Dear Mo:
I se no way for you to keep Pesah at William Hanry thear fore you had batter come over hear the Sunday before than you neat not due any thing to your house to git the hamez out of your house…
Memoirs
For the two reasons specified below, I have given myself the surname “Wasserzug”; the first reason is that when I was five or six years of age, I was playing with some young children, I believe, in a…
A Seder Night
A medieval rabbi barely escapes from a blood libel accusation at his own Seder table in this prescient nineteenth-century story by the famous German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine.
A Dirge for the Ninth of Av
Let us chant, my brothers,
this dirge together,
for God severed our hands
by this disaster.