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We’re striding in your front ranks,
marching mankind—
with the cool and with the fervid,
with the proud and the courageous—
step after step!
On his high gibbet, the old god
swings and swings.
Patched…
He sings in the courtyard, clad in rags
A small, poor chap, a crazed Jew.
People drive him away, God has muddled his wits
Ages and exile have confused his tongue
He wails and he dances, weeps and…
A dull, rhythmic tremor thudded inside the room over and over again, as if someone was pounding on the wall behind her head with his fists. She sat up in bed and tried to get up. After several vain…
for Aaron Lebedeff (1873–1960), performer on the Yiddish stage
Bewildering clarity of tongues:
names you never heard, food
you never ate, a wild dance
you never learned, light hanging
in the sky…
How is a song born?
Like a baby.
At first it hurts
But then, it comes out
And everyone is happy
And suddenly—
How wonderful!
It’s walking
All on its own.
How is a song born?
Like…
There are things in this country too—
And if they find no streetlamp pole,
There will be a tree—and that means clearly
That a Negro over twenty years old
May hate all things which spire
To hold a man…
A Jewish musiker,
Alex Herzovitch,
wound his Schubert around and around
like diamonds.
Morning to night, happy, oh happy,
he ground out that same old
sonata, ground it by rote, ground it
to a…
At home I have a blue piano,
I, who cannot play a note.
It stands in the gloom of the cellar door,
now that the world has grown coarse.
The four hands of the stars play there
—the moonwife sang…
O you paragon of glory and grace, listen to the call of Papos and his cry! He is bellowing like a bull, braying at you like a donkey, for you are his cow and his she-ass. His heart is already parched…
Leehee woke me up at a quarter of four in the afternoon and asked me to come with them to Ein Hod for the Seder, despite everything.
“Don’t do this to me,” I said. “You know I’m not…