Sunday, May 28, 2006

102 Itche Goldberg. My Most Inspirational Teacher



The New York Times May 27, 2006. By DAN BARRY .Stubborn as His Kultur, the Old Man Lives. On the eighth floor of an ancient office building in the Flatiron district, a fixture is missing. Knock on Room 820, and a young woman says her company has been there for just a couple of months; try the next door. Knock on Room 816, and nothing. Peer through the mailslot, emptiness.But around the corner, a maintenance man reading a Spanish news paper in the utility closet has news of that missing fixture: "The old man,he not here anymore."That's right: The old man, Itche Goldberg, not here anymore. For decades, he toiled on this floor, in an office crammed with books andideas, to produce what was once a premier Yiddish literary journal,Yidishe Kultur. It was published monthly, then every other month,then a few times a year, and then, finally, once, in 2004.Mr. Goldberg would take an Access-A-Ride van to the office, where he wrote, read manuscripts, maintained correspondences and tried to raise money to keep the periodical going. But just as the desire for sophisticated criticism of Yiddish literature gradually waned, so too did his ability to get to an office five days a week.Understandable, given that he is 102.A few weeks ago, the office of Yidishe Kultur was closed, but only inthe physical sense. It continues to live within Mr. Goldberg, who clings to the belief that support will come, money will materialize,and his beloved Yiddish culture, to which he dedicated a longlifetime, will thrive."It isn't easy," he says. He says this often, but to hear him say it,you detect more hope than despair.Mr. Goldberg sits in his West Side apartment's crammed study,white-haired and small, fiddling with the translucent hose feedingoxygen to his nose. A portrait of him, much younger, hangs on thewall. Papers spill from shopping bags. Pipes he has not smoked in aquarter-century gather dust. And surrounding him, books, books,books, almost all in Yiddish.LOOK at these walls, I beg you," he says. "If I couldn't have these writers..." He banishes the thought, then adds: "With all this I became part of a culture. And it kept us going quite a while."For many who care about highbrow Yiddish culture, Mr. Goldberg is a keeper of the flickering flame. "A titan," says Thomas E. Bird, aprofessor of East European languages and literature at QueensCollege. "A brilliant scholar of literature. A master teacher of generations."But how does one succinctly sum up 102 years?Born in 1904 in what is now Poland, suffered deprivation andprejudice, demonstrated scholarly aptitude, moved to Toronto, began teaching Yiddish, married a social worker named Jennie who turned 100 in December got involved in communist Yiddish culture, helped to establish Yiddish schools across the country, published a children'smagazine.Wrote and edited, all to further a language left for dead by theNazis. Raised two children, Susan and David. Feared the knock on the door during the McCarthy era. Lived through the bitter quarrels within the Yiddish left. Taught, lectured, wrote, edited, survived.Mr. Goldberg skips over this point and stops at that one, pausinghere to recall the Marxist scholar Morris Schappes and there toemphasize that being a secular Jew does not mean he is anti-religious. He delivers a brief lecture about Yiddish labor poetry, then asks, not for the only time, "Are you aware of this?"His longtime editorial assistant, Shoshana Balaban-Wolkowitz,materializes to check on his visitor. "You want something to drink?"she asks. "Almost cold ginger ale? Very bad coffee?"Mr. Goldberg continues his lecture, speaking with a nimble wit thatseeks to nurse humor from language whenever possible. When he stepson his air line, for example, he mimics a telephone operator's flatvoice: "Line 1."Unable at one point to immediately summon his whereabouts in 1930, heconfides, "By the way, things slip for me.""That's O.K.," he is reassured."No, it's not O.K.," he answers quickly, then returns to emphasizingthe importance of Yiddish as a central means of expression for Jewish culture. Fixing his gaze on his visitor, he says, "I hope what emerges is a certain stubbornness, a certain belief, a certain creativity that we cherish."Mr. Goldberg gently indicates that he has better things to do than totalk more about himself. But yes, he still reads, with the assistance of a magnifying lamp on his desk that enlarges print.As a matter of fact, he says, he is re-reading his own latest book,"Essayen Tsvey" ("Essays Two"), the recent publication of which"surely makes him the oldest writer ever to have published a newbook," according to The London Times Literary Supplement.The 467-page book contains more than two dozen essays by this erudite Yiddish fixture. Among them is one called, simply, "The Story of My 100 Years."E-mail: dabarry@nytimes.com

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Who's Illegal?

WHO'S MORE ILLEGAL HERE? BILL O'REILLY & GEORGE BUSH OR A DESCENDANTOF AZTECS AND INCAS? ROBERT MIRANDA, HISPANIC VISTA - Mexicans come from 10,000 years ofhuman history and all of it in the conquered lands now known inhistory books as Mesoamerica and the United States of North America.Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Columbians and all the ethnic peoples that makeup Latin America and the Caribbean basin come from native tribes thatflourished long before the invasion of the Spanish Europeans and theintroduction of African slaves into this Hemisphere. . .Latinos are a people who remember our ancestry. We know that the landsthat were taken after the Indian Wars and the Mexican - American War,are ancestral lands that many Mexicans consider to this day as part oftheir ancient history.Who you calling "illegal?"The Aztecs and Incas, Apache, the Comanche, Pueblo Indians and all thenative people who for thousands of years harvested these lands andbuilt cities, and lived free under their own set of laws and rules,thrived and prospered. . .These lands stolen by the greed and manipulations and war of those whoarrived on ships from Europe, and then began stealing land that wasnever theirs, today have descendents who have inherited their wealthfrom this theft and have turned to the descendents of the nativepeople and have called them "illegal".Who you calling "illegal?"The blood of Geronimo, Orocobix, Cochise and Pope, of the PuebloIndians reminds us conscious Latinos - Chicanos of our legacy andancient history. I'm supposed to surrender this history because LouDobbs, Rush Limbaugh and Milwaukee's local right-wing talking headssay that I must? . . .Who you calling "illegal"?http://www.hispanicvista.com/HVC/Columnist/posiojr/051006osio2.htm

Thursday, May 11, 2006

German Robin Hoods

German 'Robin Hoods' give poor a taste of the high life. A gang of Robin Hood-style thieves, who dress as superheroes and steal expensive food from exclusive restaurants and delicatessens to give to the poor, are being hunted by police in the German city of Hamburg.http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=692762006

Thursday, May 04, 2006

When The Anthem Was In Yiddish

Thursday, May 4, 2006Welcome, klezmer41 (logout - Media Links
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When the Anthem Was in YiddishBy RUKHL SCHAECHTERMay 5, 2006
The release last Friday of a Spanish version of the "The Star-Spangled Banner" sparked heated debate on radio talk shows and in the blogosphere. Some pundits took to calling the song "The Illegal Alien Anthem." Even the president has weighed in on the matter. (He's opposed.)
But as one might expect in a country built by immigrants, this was hardly the first time the national anthem has been translated into another tongue. The song has given rise to German, French, Chinese, Native American and even Yiddish versions.
In fact, there have been at least two Yiddish renditions. One, "Di Shtern-Batsirte Fon" by Yiddish poet Avrom Aisen, was published in 1943 by the Educational Alliance on New York City's Lower East Side to mark the 100th "yahrzeit" of anthem scribe Francis Scott Key. The left-wing Jewish People's Fraternal Order published the second, by Ber Grin, in 1947.
In terms of accuracy, rhythm and rhyme, Aisen's translation is certainly the better. Aisen, who was born in Brisk, Poland (which today is Brest, Belarus), in 1886, immigrated to New York in 1903. His first poem appeared in the anarchist Yiddish newspaper Freier Arbeter Shtimme in 1907, and he continued to publish Yiddish poetry in almost a dozen newspapers, including the Forverts, even after attaining a degree in dentistry in 1912. After 1920 he devoted himself to translating the works of American and British poets — Byron, Tennyson, Longfellow, Whitman and all of Shakespeare's sonnets — into Yiddish, presumably to give Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe a taste of the literature that awaited them once they mastered the English language.
And the Jews didn't stop with "The Star-Spangled Banner." Mandy Patinkin's album "Mameloshen" (1998) presents a Yiddish version of "God Bless America," and to this day the 84-year old Jewish People's Philharmonic Chorus includes in its repertoire Berl Latin's stirring Yiddish translation of "America the Beautiful." Far from being a refusal to learn a new language, such translations are instead an expression of gratitude toward an open and hospitable land.