Famous Yiddish Quotes

Life, John Lennon famously said, is what happens to you while you’re making other plans. Now that I think of it, Lennon, that wizard of words and music, probably wasn’t the first. There’s an old Yiddish proverb, “Man plans and God laughs.” Probably every culture has a virtually identical aphorism.

The famous Dubner maggid, a gaon, was asked by an admiring student: “How is it that you always have the perfect parable for the topic under discussion?” The gaon smiled. “I’ll answer with a parable.” And he told the following story: A lieutenant of the Tsar’s cavalry, riding through a small shtetl, drew his horse up in astonishment, for on the side of a barn he saw a hundred chalked circles—and in the center of each was a bullet hole! The lieutenant excitedly stopped the first passerby, crying, “Who is the astonishing marksman in this place? Look at all those bull’s-eyes!” The passerby sighed. “That’s Shepsel, the shoemaker’s son, who is a little peculiar.” “I don’t care what he is,” said the lieutenant. “Any man who can shoot that well—” “Ah,” the pedestrian said, “you don’t understand. You see, first Shepsel shoots—then he draws the circle.” The gaon smiled. “That’s the way it is with me. I don’t search for a parable to fit the subject. I introduce the subject for which I have a perfect parable.

We had to pause for a moment at a red light, and the group clustered tight around Darius as he went on. "Even stranger, Vilnius appears on early maps under a variety of names. To the Germans, Vilnius was called Die Wilde, because it was surrounded by wilderness and swamps. But the irony of a city called the Wilderness is not slight. Well! The Poles called her Wilno, the Lithuanians called her Vilnius, the French and Russians called her Vilna. It is also, of course, Vilna is Yiddish. Sometimes Vilnius appears multiple times on the same map, as though she is a pair of entangled particles that can exist in two places at once. In some ways, it is difficult to think of Vilnius as a single city at all. Czeslaw Milosz famously wrote a poem about Vilnius called 'City Without a Name.' So how shall we think of this city then?

The play The Kibitzer, by Jo Swerling (1929), made both the title and its star, Edward G. Robinson, famous overnight. The sign on the door read: DR. JOSEPH KIPNIS PSYCHIATRIST DR. ELI LOWITZ PROCTOLOGIST Under this, a kibitzer had written: “Specialists in Odds and Ends.