Posts Tagged "yiddish"

3/20 | Birthday of Moyshe Kulbak

3/20 | Birthday of Moyshe Kulbak

Today in Yiddishkayt… March 20 Birthday of Moyshe Kulbak, Poet Moyshe Kulbak was born in Smorgon (today Смаргонь, Belarus), Vilna Province of the Russian Empire on March 20, 1896. The small town had a legendary status among the Jews of the area. The Radziwill family, which historically controlled the region, had set up a circus bear training academy in the town and created thriving leather and tanning industry as well as a tar manufacturing concern. The surreal mix of circus bears and local laborers making their living from the land would eventually be immortalized in Kulbak’s...

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2/24 | Birthday of Shmuel Yankev Imber

2/24 | Birthday of Shmuel Yankev Imber

Today in Yiddishkayt… February 24 Birthday of Shmuel Yankev Imber, Yiddish & Polish Poet   Shmuel Yankev Imber was born on February 24, 1889 in Sassów (today: Сасів, Ukraine) into a literary family, his great-uncle wrote the poem “תּקװתנו” (“Our Hope”), which later evolved into the Israeli national anthem. Imber grew up near Tarnopol in Eastern Galicia and began writing Yiddish poems at a young age. His first poems were published in 1905. In 1909, his first collection of poems was published under the title װאָס איך זינג און...

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2/17 | Birthday of Ossip Dymov

2/17 | Birthday of Ossip Dymov

Today in Yiddishkayt… February 17 Birthday of Ossip Dymov (Yosef Perelman), Yiddish Writer    Yosef Perelman was born on February 17, 1878 in Białystok. In 1902, Perelman graduated from the Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg where he earned a degree in land surveying. He took an interest in literature and began writing under the pseudonym Ossip Dymov, named after a character in Anton Chekhov’s classic short story “Grasshopper.” His literary career began as a columnist for a Saint Petersburg weekly called Театр и искусство (Theater and...

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Der Vortsman — February 2012

Der Vortsman — February 2012

Whatever.   Strange: Just as one reader asked a question, another posed a query that responded to the first — almost. Reader 1: “How would you say ‘whatever’ in Yiddish? I mean, the way that word is now used, dismissively, especially by teenagers.” Reader 2: “My parents used to say ‘nit gepidlt’ when they meant to dismiss something as unimportant. Does it have anything to do with ‘piddling?’” Der Vortsman informed Reader 2 that his memory or hearing was faulty…that the phrase his parents used was actually ‘nit gefidlt’ meaning “so I/you/it...

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2/7 | Birthday of Moyshe Stavsky

2/7 | Birthday of Moyshe Stavsky

Today in Yiddishkayt… February 7 Birthday of Moyshe Stavsky (Moshe Stavi), Yiddish and Hebrew Writer    Moyshe Stavsky was born in the White Russian shtetl of Antopol (today Антопаль, Belarus). His father was a maskil who ran a grain concern and was a leader of the town’s Jewish community. Although young Moyshe loathed going, he attended the local kheder until he reached bar-mitzva age and attended primary school in Antopol. At 16 he left the shtetl and lived in Warsaw, Kremenchug, and for some time in Aleksandrowo on the border between Lithuania and East Prussia,...

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