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A few days after receiving your precious letter of 5 November 1854, I began collating [the pages of my book], which took me until New Year’s eve to finish. But what a chasm in between! I began the…
A peasant was transporting a large cart of hay. He had to pass through a low gateway, but the cart couldn’t pass under it. People advised the peasant to wear glasses with magnifying lenses, so that…
Iofin’s portrait of his parents, painted before his emigration from the Soviet Union, was a sly protest against Socialist Realism. He painted in the style but parodied it by overloading his picture…
Almost before she was out of the cradle, Sonechka was a bookworm. As Efrem, elder brother and family satirist, never tired of repeating, “All that reading has given Sonechka a butt like a chair and a…
A moon full of shimmering honey,
Exuding joy.
What bird beats in my heart?
Fly away—away, but not alone.
What am I shy? What?
Thick empyrean wine.
I’ll take a wicker bottle,
To the cemetery alone…
Cover of Sikhes-khulin: Eyne fun di geshikhtn (Small Talk, or, The Legend of Prague) by Moyshe Broderzon, with illustrations by El Lissitzky. The book is an example of a new modernist style that…
Ḥad Gadya (One Little Goat) is a song customarily sung at the end of the Passover seder. It recounts a sequence of events beginning with a young goat purchased by the protagonist’s father that is then…
Of all festivities celebrated among the Jews in southern Russia, the wedding ceremony has suffered the greatest loss of characteristic elements of folk tradition. Even among the poorest, weddings are…
From Kiev I took a wagon heading for Zhitomir. Few of my readers will still remember the long coach wagons in which the past generation traveled before the railroads…
Collection of writings, proclamations, and epistles related to the controversy between Hasidim and Misnagdim during the emergence of Hasidism (1772–1816)