Category: Literature

The Weekly Reader from the Yiddish Book Center
By Categories: Arts, History, Literature

The long and complicated history of Jews in Ukraine was not always a happy one, but it would be a mistake to think of it as an unmitigated series of upheavals. To the contrary, the region gave rise to some of the greatest achievements of Jewish literature and culture, as the collections of the Yiddish Book Center bear witness. As exhibit A, you can listen to this program of readings and songs from Yiddish works in translation by Yiddish writers from Ukraine including Blume Lempel, Mendel Osherowitz, Dora Shulner, and Sholem Aleichem.

View our map of Yiddish writers who were born or lived or worked in Ukraine
Continue reading The Weekly Reader from the Yiddish Book Center

POETRY MONDAY: JULY 4, 2022
By Categories: Literature, Poetry Monday

                               P.D. PIN

           

Good morning, everyone.  Happy (we hope) Fourth of July, here in the good old U.S.A., in a year when we’re all worried about whether we still have a
democracy.  The good news today is that we’re finally getting somewhere with our gun laws — a bipartisan result that means we’re also finally getting somewhere with bi-partisanship.

Enough about that.  Now it time for the healing of our souls with poetry.  Our poet this morning is a brand-new one with a modest publishing history but a fascinating background.

P.D. Pin was born and raised in southwestern Ontario.  Her parents moved to Canada before she was born from Friuli, Italy, a region bordering Austria and Slovenia.  She lived in several places, like Milan, Italy, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Toronto, Ontario before moving to Western Massachusetts in 2011.

She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario in London and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry and translation from Vermont College.  Since 2014 she has worked at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s homestead in Lenox, MA; first as a docent, then as bookstore manager, and currently as Public Programs Director. Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: JULY 4, 2022

Poetry Monday: June 6, 2022
By Categories: Literature, Poetry Monday

Jamey Hecht

Good morning, everyone!  This is beginning to sound like same-old, same-0ld, but that’s because it is.
Depending on where we live and percentages of viruses, vaccinations, masking and hand-washing, we’ve all seen recommendations go up and down and, being the intelligent rule-followers that we are, we’ve done our best to obey.
But it’s exhausting – and even expensive, as our prices also go up and down.  It’s at times like these that we most need the soul-healing experience of poetry.
With this in mind, I’m happy to introduce you to a wonderful poet named Jamey Hecht.
He’s new to me and probably not new to many of you, because he’s been writing for a very long time. Jamey is the author of five books to date: Plato’s Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament (Twayne, 1999); Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus, a translation with commentary, (Wordsworth Editions, 2005); Bloom’s How to Write about Homer  (Chelsea, 2010); and two books of poetry. Limousine, Midnight Blue (Red Hen Press, 2009) is fifty elegies for President Kennedy.  Dodo Feathers: Poems 1989 – 2019 is a collection published by IPBooks. Continue reading Poetry Monday: June 6, 2022