Yiddish Quotes

Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.

It’s Yiddish. Like…Ikh hob dikh lib.” Evie narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “What does that mean?” Sam smiled. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.

Jesus Fucking Christ,” she says with that flawless hardpan accent of hers. It is an expression that always strikes Landsman as curious, or at least as something that he would pay money to see.

When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.

They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.

Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.

And that was when you realized the fire was inside you all the time. And that was the miracle. Just that.

I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.

He didn't want to be what he wasn't, he didn't know how to be what he was.

Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-' She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.

The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.

It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle.

...Landsman doesn't buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman.

Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.

A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

KVETCH:(Yiddish) verb: to gripe or fret; noun: a chronic complainer, a whiner

The kind of people who spoke mostly Yiddish, which is a combination of German and phlegm. This is a language of coughing and spitting; until I was eleven, I wore a raincoat.

There is a Yiddish saying: “If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.

A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman’s lack of faith.

The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody's asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?

Grinning, he grabbed his fisherman’s cap and coat. “I love you,” he whispered quietly. “Ikh hob dikh lib.” He kissed Evie’s head. She rustled in her sleep, turning away. “Fine. I see how it is. I just wasted my best Yiddish on you,” Sam joked to himself.

The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy.

The brake and gas were rigged to suit a man of his stature, and he handled them like Horowitz sailing through a storm of Liszt.

Becky, are you studying conversational Yiddish?

The tongue-in-cheek Yiddish-English “translation” for R.S.V.P. is “Remember to Send Vedding Presents.

He was distressed to learn that the Pottery Barn Kids gift registry did not extend to children's books in Italian or Yiddish.

All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption.

Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?

He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from the blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down.

Like 90 percent of the television they watch, it comes from the south and is shown dubbed into Yiddish. It concerns the adventures of a pair of children with Jewish names who look like they might be part Indian and have no visible parents. They do have a crystalline magical dragon scale that they wish on in order to travel to a land of pastel dragons, each distinguished by its color and its particular brand of imbecility. Little by little, the children spend more and more time with their magical dragon scale until one day they travel off to the land of rainbow idiocy and never return; their bodies are found by the night manager of their cheap flop, each with a bullet in the back of the head. Maybe, Landsman thinks, something gets lost in the translation.

An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left with its engine running in the middle of his brain.

The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window.

Shprintzl Rudashevsky’s wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she’s wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth.

But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given.

Man plans. God laughs.

Every hour that passes, another hundredweight of sand is poured in through a tiny hole in Landsman's soul. After his eyes are closed, what happens is never quite sleep, and the thoughts that plague him, though atrocious, are never quite dreams.

Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away. Landsman looks away.

Six Lines I know that in this world no one needs me, me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish? Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty and only the ephemeral is godly and humility is the only true rebellion

Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. There was something in Mendele. There was a fire.

Get dressed,' Bina says. 'And do yourself a favor? Clean this shit up. Look at this dump. I can't believe you're living like this. Sweet God, aren't you ashamed of yourself?' Once Bina Gelbfish believed in Meyer Landsman. Or she believed from the moment she met him, that there was a sense in that meeting, that some detectable intention lay behind their marriage. They were twisted like a pair of chromosomes, of course they were, but where Landsman saw in that twisting together only a tangle, a chance snarling of lines, Bina saw the hand of the Maker of Knots. And for her faith, Landsman repaid her with his faith in Nothing itself. 'Only every time I see your face,' Landsman says.

Fuck what is written," Landsman says. “You know what?" All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. “I don't care what is written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.

I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn’t seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently.

I don't care if you care, I retorted. But in my religion, we're taught to admit our mistakes and to apologize for them...Oh, and there's one other thing I'm sorry about, I added. I should've spit in your eye and called you a szhlob weeks ago.

But there was always a shortfall, wasn't there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall 'the world.' Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collapsed. Until then, thanks be unto His Name, sparks, bright sparks, might leap across the gap, as between electric poles. And we must be grateful for their momentary light.

Writing after the Holocaust had destroyed a third of the world’s Jews, Yiddish poet Kadia Molodowsky (1894–1975) addressed the “Chosen People” doctrine most poignantly: “O God of Mercy,” she wrote, “For the time being / Choose another people.

She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other.

A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform, and this also applies to a soldier who serves the Almighty.

Yiddish is a cheerful language of not so happy people.

Lose an hour in the morning, chase it all day.”—a Yiddish saying, author unknown

Ferencz asked, “Do I have to look up to heaven or down to the Devil to find the culprit?” The rabbi replied in Yiddish, “Do not look up or down—take my advice—kik vek!

If God lived on earth,” goes a sardonic Yiddish saying, “people would knock out all His windows.

Eviction," Frieda said. "You can't pay, you can't stay." She said in Yiddish, "Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben." It's hard to make a living.

When a father gives to his son, they both laugh. When a son gives to his father, they both cry.                                       —Yiddish proverb

Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick's face...The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.

husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light" (203): Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93.   Yiddish's

You have to look at Jews like Bina Gelbfish, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the district of Sitka. Methodological, organised, persistent, resourceful, prepared... A mere re-drawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

whenever we become the leader and try to make God the servant, things don’t work out. Why? Because our EGO gets in the way, and we Edge God Out! If you want your life to be significant, then you have to recognize that it’s all about God, not about you. As the old Yiddish saying goes, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.

...when he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child.

In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines. She was all but illiterate in Yiddish and English but obliged my grandfather, and later Uncle Ray, to read to her daily from the Yiddish press so that she could keep abreast of the latest calamities to beset Jewry. From

She can’t go in there,” he says firmly. “It isn’t appropriate.” “See this, sweetness?” Bina has fished out her badge. “I’m like a cash gift. I’m always appropriate.

God made man because He loves stories

... he lifted his eyes. The eternal kind went out of his shoulder. He opened his mouth and closed it again, speechless with outrage, joy, and wonder. Then he burst into tears.

We today can recognize the antiquity of astrology in words such as disaster, which is Greek for “bad star,” influenza, Italian for (astral) “influence”; mazeltov, Hebrew—and, ultimately, Babylonian—for “good constellation,” or the Yiddish word shlamazel, applied to someone plagued by relentless ill-fortune, which again traces to the Babylonian astronomical lexicon. According to Pliny, there were Romans considered sideratio, “planet-struck.” Planets were widely thought to be a direct cause of death. Or consider consider: it means “with the planets,” evidently a prerequisite for serious reflection.

Naomi was a tough kid, so much tougher than Landsman ever needed to be. She was two years younger, close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove. She was boyish as a girl and mannish as a woman. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, “In everything but sexual preference.

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us--we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It's the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The memory of that summer, for example, or the thought that he had long since exhausted the patience of a kid who once would have waited a thousand years to spend an hour with him shooting cans off a fence with an air rifle. The sight of the Longhouse breaks some small, as yet unbroken facet of Landman's heart. All of the things they made, during their minute in this corner of the map, dissolved in brambles of salmonberry and oblivion.

and my friend Karen remembers as a little girl studying Hebrew she inquired of her refugee tutor who stroked his beard and said in Yiddish "if there is a god or if there isn't a god a Jew studies"--isn't that a good story beloved, but the woman in me says that the poet lies the poet can afford to lie

Their fellow Pennsylvanians knew nothing about the shattered shtetls and destroyed synagogues of the old country; they had not set eyes on the stunned elderly immigrants starving in tenements in New York, the old ones who came alone, who spoke Yiddish only, whose children died or left them to live in charity homes, the women frightened until the end, the men consigned to a life of selling vegetables and fruits on horse-drawn carts. They were a lost nation spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. Americans cared about money.

Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union: Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.

Kim są ci ludzie?- powtarza Herc Szemec. - To żydki. Żydki, które coś knują. Wiem, że to tautologia.

SCENE: Classroom, Lower East Side, 1926. Teacher: “Who can tell us where the Romanian border is?” Student: “In the park with my aunt, and my mother doesn’t trust him!

He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin.

LIFE is the biggest bargain you can get.You get it for FREE! Yiddish saying

As you know, six nights a week we gather together to sing songs we know and love, to dance, to escape our daily lives. But on the seventh night … God created Yiddish theater.

referred to the Ghetto, a Yiddish term, sitre akhre, for the dim world where demons dwell and zombies wear "a husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light.

Why do the wicked always form groups, whereas the righteous do not? Because the wicked, walking in darkness, need company, but the righteous, who live in the light, do not fear being alone.

INTERVIEWER Why don’t you write tragedy? BARTHELME I’m fated to deal in mixtures, slumgullions, which preclude tragedy, which require a pure line. It’s a habit of mind, a perversity. Tom Hess used to tell a story, maybe from Lewis Carroll, I don’t remember, about an enraged mob storming the palace shouting “More taxes! Less bread!” As soon as I hear a proposition I immediately consider its opposite. A double-minded man—makes for mixtures. INTERVIEWER Apparently the Yiddish theater, to which Kafka was very addicted, includes as a typical bit of comedy two clowns, more or less identical, who appear even in sad scenes—the parting of two lovers, for instance—and behave comically as the audience is weeping. This shows up especially in The Castle. BARTHELME The assistants. INTERVIEWER And the audience doesn’t know what to do. BARTHELME The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude. As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it’s being poorly done. [...] I think of the line from the German writer Heimito von Doderer: “At first you break windows. Then you become a window yourself.

Waiter: “Tea or coffee, gentlemen?” First customer: “I’ll have tea.” Second customer: “Me too—and be sure the glass is clean!” (WAITER EXITS, RETURNS) Waiter: “Two teas. Which one asked for the clean glass?

Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker.

She reaches down into her bulging tote bag and pulls out a small plastic box with a hinged lid. It contains a round pill box with a threaded lid from which she tips out a vitamin pill, a fish-oil pill, and the enzyme tablet that lets her stomach digest milk. Inside the hinged plastic box she also carries packets of salt, pepper, horseradish, and hand-wipes, a doll size bottle of Tabasco sauce, chlorine pills for treating drinking water, Pepto-Bismol chews, and God knows what else. If you go to a concert, Bina has opera glasses. If you need to sit on the grass, she whips out a towel. Ant traps, a corkscrew, candles and matches, a dog muzzle, a penknife, a tiny aerosol can of freon, a magnifying glass - Landsman has seen everything come out of that overstuffed cowhide at one time or another.

...all the pools are going batshit like you wouldn't believe.... Batshit... It's a technical term... Fleidermausscheisse, okay?" Fleidermausscheisse? Kelly silently mouthed the word, and as silently clapped her hands. With a dictionary and patience, she could read scientific German. Thanks to fragments of Yiddish from her folks, she could make a better--not good, but better--stab at speaking it than most of her anglophone peers. But she knew she never would have come up with that particular terminus technicus in a million months of Sundays.

But because delicatessens are oriented around the consumption of red meat, the iconic Jewish eatery did take on a manly vibe, one that was exploited, as we shall see, by vaudeville routines, films, and TV shows about Jewish men using the delicatessen to shore up their precarious sense of masculinity. The food writer Arthur Schwartz has pointed out that, in Yiddish, the word for “overstuffed” is ongeshtupped; the meat is crammed between the bread in a crude, sensual way that recalls the act of copulation.27 The delicatessen, after all, is a space of carnality, of the pleasures of the “flesh”—the word for meat in Yiddish is fleysh.

To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. It had been known about before, but it has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, whose standard work The Destruction of the European Jews I mentioned before. In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.

The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.

The Mercy The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandana and taught her the word, "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on, then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space without limit rushing off to the corners of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish to find her family in New York, prayers unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat while smallpox raged among the passengers and crew until the dead were buried at sea with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. "The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book I located in a windowless room of the library on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days offshore in quarantine before the passengers disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune" registered as Danish, "Umberto IV," the list goes on for pages, November gives way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. Italian miners from Piemonte dig under towns in western Pennsylvania only to rediscover the same nightmare they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.

Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined desert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God.

The hidden master of the Filipino-style Chinese donut is Benito Taganes, proprietor and king of the bubbling vats at Mabuhay. Mabuhay, dark, cramped, invisible from the street, stays open all night long. It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers and shlemiels, whores and night owls. With the fat applauding in the fryers, the exhaust fans roaring, and the boom box blasting the heartsick kundimans of Benito’s Manila childhood, the clientele makes free with their secrets. A golden mist of kosher oil hangs in the air and baffles the senses. Who could overhear with ears full of KosherFry and the wailing of Diomedes Maturan?

An official brought the chief rabbi of a town before the Court of the Inquisition and told him, “We will leave the fate of your people to God. I’m putting two slips of paper in this box. On one is written ‘Guilty.’ On the other is written ‘Innocent.’ Draw.” Now this inquisitor was known to seek the slaughter of all the Jews, and he had written “Guilty” on both pieces of paper. The rabbi put his hand inside the box, withdrew a slip of paper—and swallowed it. “What are you doing?” cried the inquisitor. “How will the court know—” “That’s simple,” said the rabbi. “Examine the slip that’s in the box. If it reads ‘Innocent,’ then the paper I swallowed obviously must have read ‘Guilty.’ But if the paper in the box reads ‘Guilty,’ then the one I swallowed must have read ‘Innocent.

For twenty years Mr. Sokoloff had been eating at the same restaurant on Second Avenue. On this night, as on every other, Mr. Sokoloff ordered chicken soup. The waiter set it down and started off. Mr. Sokoloff called, “Waiter!” “Yeah?” “Please taste this soup.” The waiter said, “Hanh? Twenty years you’ve been eating the chicken soup here, no? Have you ever had a bad plate—” “Waiter,” Sokoloff said firmly, “taste the soup.” “Sokoloff, what’s the matter with you?” “Taste the soup!” “All right, all right,” the waiter said, grimacing. “I’ll taste—where’s the spoon?” “Aha!” cried Sokoloff.

In one of the extras that come with the DVD version of the movie (Groundhog Day), Danny Rubin, who came up with the original idea and then wrote the script, says that the movie is about “doing what you can do in the moment to make things better instead of making them worse.” Which might not sound like very much, but it’s just about all you can do in life. Which only proves that the world itself runs on Yiddish-speaking principles: the best way to get what you want and make all those bastards out there so jealous that they’ll want to poke their own eyes out is to go out of your way to be nice to those bastards. That’s the way to show them. That’s how a mentsh gets revenge.

A German or a Russian mamaloschen (mother tongue) pedigree made for two wildly different translations of the same verse by the American Yiddish poet H. Leyvik. "Dos turemdike lebn in der turemdike shtot", translated "The towering life of the towering city" (Yiddish turem, "tower," of German origin) became in another version "The imprisoned life of the prison city" (via turme, "prison", from Russian). I discovered this old "plot" in a recent lecture, a volume on American Yiddish Poetry, by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav. One of those gentle epiphanies that only apparently obscure footnotes or references could reveal. In a frivolous gesture, I concocted an improbable rendition based on both translations, a slice of contemporary universal metropolitan spleen: The imprisoned life of the towering city.

But I never forgot Shosha. I dreamed of her at night. In my dreams she was both dead and alive. I played with her in a garden which was also a cemetery. Dead girls joined us there, wearing garments that were ornate shrouds. They danced in circles and sang songs. They swung, skated, occasionally hovered in the air. I strolled with Shosha in a forest of gigantic trees that reached the sky. The birds there were different from any I knew. They were as big as eagles, as colorful as parrots. They spoke Yiddish. From the thickets surrounding the garden, beasts with human faces showed themselves. Shosha was at home in this garden, and instead of my pointing out and explaining to her as I had done in the past, she revealed to me things I hadn't known and whispered secrets in my ear. Her hair had grown long enough to reach her loins, and her flesh glowed like mother-of-pearl. I always awoke from this dream with a sweet taste in my mouth and the impression that Shosha was on longer living.

Here’s an imaginary twin pair that would be God’s gift to behavior geneticists—identical twin boys separated at birth. One, Shmuel, is raised as an Orthodox Jew in the Amazon; the other, Wolfie, is raised as a Nazi in the Sahara. Reunite them as adults and see if they do similar quirky things like, say, flushing the toilet before using it. Flabbergastingly, one twin pair came close to that. They were born in 1933 in Trinidad to a German Catholic mother and a Jewish father; when the boys were six months of age, the parents separated; the mother returned to Germany with one son, and the other remained in Trinidad with the father. The latter was raised there and in Israel as Jack Yufe, an observant Jew whose first language was Yiddish. The other, Oskar Stohr, was raised in Germany as a Hitler Youth zealot. Reunited and studied by Bouchard, they warily got to know each other, discovering numerous shared behavioral and personality traits including . . . flushing the toilet before use.

Berkman and Goldman had met three years earlier, in the dim, smoke-filled dining room of Sachs’ Café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Sachs’ was the regular hangout of Yiddish-speaking radicals, poets, and free spirits. Goldman had found her way there after escaping a loveless marriage and oppressive relatives. She had felt that no one in her family understood her, and she couldn’t fathom why they weren’t as angry as she was about the injustices of American society. She seethed with anger over the highly publicized hanging of four anarchists. They had been wrongly convicted of conspiracy following the detonation of a bomb thrown by an unseen assailant at an 1886 labor rally for the eight-hour day on Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The executed men had been made into scapegoats. They were rounded up because of their views and given a sham trial to placate a disquieted public agitated by a yellow press who saw bearded, fiery-eyed foreign revolutionaries behind every strike and workers rally. The Goldmans had fled oppression in their native Russia only to find that capitalists were no better than czars.

From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow¬ capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, star¬ing out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot—no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Lands¬man recognizes the expression on Dick's face. It's the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motor¬cycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.