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.
Destination Palestine: The Story of the Haganah Ship Exodus 1947
The voices of thousands of people floated to us on the quay. They were singing “Hatikvah,” the Hebrew hymn of hope. It was the song the Jews sang at every emergency and in every crisis. It was their…
Journey through a Small Planet
The New York Yiddish Theater opened its London season that autumn with what the drama critic of our building, a watchmaker named Shmulik, described as a daring translation of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing…
Soul of Wood
Those who had no papers entitling them to live lined up to die. The whole North-west Station was a gigantic waiting-room. It was a long, long wait, but eventually everyone’s turn came. Those who…
To Be a Jew
In memory of my father, Salomón Motje Rozitchner.
What other eternity is there
if not that of knowing
you are eternally dead.
For Jews the choices are not just difficult. The revolution requires the…
Lies My Father Told Me
My grandfather stood six feet three in his worn-out bedroom slippers. He had a long grey beard with streaks of white running through it. When he prayed, his voice boomed like a choir as he turned the…
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Duddy drove to Montreal the next morning, picked up his stuff, and returned to Ste. Agathe by bus the same evening. Yvette met him at the station. “Hey,” he said, “did you see the paper? They raided…
Jews in the Promised Land
On the first day they sailed, the Pechofs saw the film called Argentina, the Promised Land. The screen had been divided into four parts like a coat of arms, and they saw wheat fields, cows in profile…
Great Jewish Short Stories
Most of the stories in this collection are modern; a few are ancient. They were written in Hebrew, German, Yiddish, Russian and English, yet all are, to a discerning eye, very clearly Jewish. [ . . .…
Herself
Apples. That’s what New Yorkers of the 1930s remember. Apples of the Hesperides, neatly stalled on corner after corner, sold on the last trembling line of decency by men who were unwilling to beg…
The Pagan Rabbi
When I heard that Isaac Kornfeld, a man of piety and brains, had hanged himself in the public park, I put a token in the subway stile and journeyed out to see the tree. [ . . . ][ . . . ] On the day…