Immigrants To The United States

"Everyone laid a hand on him and closed their eyes. It reminded Roen of one of those healing prayer circles he attended in college church. No one ever got healed, but it was a good way for him to get close to some girls."

"“I don’t know how many ways I can say no before it sinks into his concrete head.” The rich rarely accept “no” as an answer."

"Conflict does breed innovation, but so does diversity and cultural development. Bringing people together to share ideas is just as powerful a catalyst."

"Then someone said the magic words. “The Internet is down!”"

"“What’s the trick?” It is easy. The trick is I am much smarter than you."

"I tried to warn you about her. “You’re not helping.” But nope, teenage humans. The worst, most ill-conceived creatures in the universe. “Other than turkeys, right?” Yes, nothing beats those morons."

"Once you spend three thousand years in the same place, you are pretty much done with it forever."

"“Son, you hungry?” Roen said, coming up behind him. “I found this pizza joint a few blocks away. It’s French pizza—” he made a face “—but French pizza’s better than no pizza. Interested?”"

"He ducked when he could, blocked when he had to, and gave up ground faster than the French in World War II."

"You, somehow, have the greatest potential of all my hosts, and are one of the dumbest, at the same time. “Gee, thanks for the confidence booster.” On the contrary, it is brave stupid people who change the world. The smart ones are usually too smart to even try."

"He was an awful liar. Tao often lamented how bad he was at it, citing it as an Achilles heel in his future career as a secret agent. It’s true. Lying, charm, and a well-fitting suit are the traits that distinguish James Bond from every other asshole with a gun. “I don’t think I even own a suit.” You do not own the other two either."

"He was also designated the tactical lead during this operation, simply because everyone else had an accent, which would give them away in a heartbeat. Well, everyone except for Chase, who was from Dallas, but that guy couldn’t lead children to an ice cream truck, let alone a last-minute multi-faceted ambush."

"She was at the same time extraordinarily sweet and completely vapid. She spent half of her time at school staring at her cell phone and the other half staring at herself."

"Fate is created, not ordained."

"I used to go skating regularly in Berlin. One day, I went to the skating rink and found I was there on the wrong day; instead of skating, they had a show. I thought I might as well stay, so I put my skates over my shoulders and went in. The show starred Sam Wooding accompanying the Chocolate Kiddies Revue; he had a 8- or 10-piece band, and I was totally fascinated."

"The ship took a long way around, via the Caribbean. A West Indian cricket player befriended me, and I began to sit at his table. From that point on, I noticed that the white passengers began treating me very strangely. Finally, one of them said: "We don't do that you know. Don't socialize with those people." That was my first encounter with segregation."

"I didn’t care about overtime. I didn’t care about how much money it cost me. I wanted to get the thing right. So I never rushed musiciansinto the studio and rushed them out. When we went into overtime,which was double for everybody and triple for the leader—forget all this, lets [sic] make the records, right? The musicians didn't just do it for the money. They wanted it right too. They listened to the playbacks and they'd say if something wasn't quite right, and go back and do it again."

"[M]y father was an architect. He and my mother separated when I was young, but before that I went with them to Russia, where he had an assignment; then World War I broke out, and he was arrested and sent to Siberia. My mother and I had a terrible journey back, on an ice-cold train, first to Paris, eventually home."

"“When Westerners remain silent out of 'respect' for foreign cultures, they show support only for the most conservative elements of those cultures. Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith.”"

"“The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters.”"

"We are a racist people in Egypt and we are in deep denial about it. On my Facebook page, I blamed racism for my argument and an Egyptian man wrote to deny that we are racists and used as his proof a program on Egyptian Radio featuring Sudanese songs and poetry! Our silence over racism not only destroys the warmth and hospitality we are proud of as Egyptians, it has deadly consequences."

"“Why do those men hate us? They hate us because they need us, they fear us, they understand how much control it takes to keep us in line, to keep us good girls with our hymens intact until it’s time for them to fuck us into mothers who raise future generations of misogynists to forever fuel their patriarchy. They hate us because we are at once their temptation and their salvation from that patriarchy, which they must sooner or later realize hurts them, too. They hate us because they know that once we rid ourselves of the alliance of State and Street that works in tandem to control us, we"

"Margolin's fierce, individualistic expressiveness was not at all concerned with the literary niceties. In a letter to the critic S. Tenenboym, she declared: “My poems are not just mumblings, aromas, spiderwebs. A large part of them are texture-massive, rhythmic, broad; and the context-dramatic.""

"Although Anna Margolin was neglected by male critics of her time, who dismissed her as a "woman writer," and her reputation suffered during the general decline of interest in Yiddish writing, now after more than half a century of obscurity, her work has been rediscovered. A new generation of feminist scholars-Adrienne Cooper, Marcia Falk, Kathryn Hellerstein, Norma Fein Pratt, Sheva Zucker, and others are reappraising Margolin's achievement. Her poetry, reissued in a Yiddish edition, speaks to us across the generations with perhaps even greater strength today than it had in her lifetime. Anna Margolin dreamed of immortality. In the last of her three poems titled "Autumn," she wrote: “Heavy autumn, heavy step, I am old./Dark heart of mine, don't curse, believe in miracles:/somewhere in the world, in a city/I am flowering like a lily.”"

"The Yiddish poet Reuven Ayzland kept her informed about how her poems were being received in the New York cafes where the Yiddish literary intelligentsia gathered. About the reception of her poem "To Be a Beggarwoman," which had just appeared in the weekly newspaper, Di Fraye Arbeter Shtime (The Liberated Workers' Voice), he wrote: "Last night, Anna Margolin was the main topic among the literati. A thousand hypotheses were offered about who might be hiding behind the name, and the general opinion is that it must certainly be a man." Later, he wrote her again: "Why people want Anna Margolin to be a man is beyond me. The general opinion, however, is that these poems are written by an experienced hand. And a woman can't write like that." These clearly prejudiced responses indicate how widespread such attitudes were at that time and perhaps cast some light on the reception her book was to receive."

"While most of the Yiddish poets of the 1920s were conventional in their use of rhyme and observed the linguistic proprieties of that time, Anna Margolin-along with other Yiddish women writers-experimented with free verse and with incongruous and jarring juxtapositions of diction and sound. Although no specific connections have been established between Anna Margolin and other Yiddish women writers, she acknowledged their general influence in a letter to Reuven Ayzland: “If I have borrowed from anyone, it was not from men, never, only from women. And if my own work shows signs of other minds, other hearts-these are the minds and hearts of women I have encountered. I never forget them.”"

"The Yiddish newspapers provided only limited opportunities for female writers. These women did not write about economics or politics, but were invariably consigned to the other side of the mekhitse (the barrier separating men from women in the synagogue)-to the women's pages, where they were limited to writing about fashion, home decor, and child rearing. Many of them, including Anna Margolin, resented this restriction. In addition to a weekly column, Margolin wrote fiction and essays...With her flair and style, she succeeded in leaving the mark of her considerable writing ability and literary consciousness on even trivial subjects. Her articles soon came to the attention of the major Yiddish and Hebrew writers, such as Chaim Nachman Bialik, Mani Leyb, and Itsik Manger. But many critics refused to believe that these articles were written by a woman. Reuven Ayzland said of her fashion section in Der Tog (The Day) that "it read like poetry.""

"During the early decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish women writers in North America considered themselves emancipated and enlightened. They created an extensive literature that ran the gamut from chronicles of the domestic scene to the experimental and highly complex writing of Anna Margolin and others."

"Enamored of the work of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, she undertook to learn Spanish. She was greatly influenced by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud; among the Germans, by Else Lasker-Schüler and Rainer Maria Rilke; and among the Yiddish poets, by Itsik Manger and Avrom Sutzkever. She was knowledgeable about the major literary trends in poetry and was a formidable critic. When Margolin's collection Lider (Poems) was published in 1929, leading writers in Warsaw discussed her work with great admiration, and gatherings were held to read and study her poetry. Although Lider was well-received in New York, it did not gain the wide readership Margolin had hoped for-even though such well-known writers as Chaim Nachman Bialik and Moishe Nadir praised her work."

"Anna Margolin was an exceptionally beautiful and gifted woman, fiercely individualistic and with a volatile temperament, who lived a tempestuous, unconventional life. Like many other Jewish women writers-Clare Goll (Franco-German poet, 1901-1977), Elsa Lasker Schüler (German poet, 1869-1945), and Yente Serdatsky (Yiddish writer, 1877-1962)-she adopted a bohemian and an eccentric lifestyle. A complex personality torn by fundamental tensions, Margolin had a keen wit, intellectual acumen, and uncompromising honesty; she was also high-strung and aggressively self-confident. She threw herself into both intellectual pursuits and romantic attachments with great passion and had a succession of lovers beyond her two marriages. Most of her liaisons were with exceptional and prominent men."

"Restless and dislocated, Margolin was deeply at odds with the world in which she found herself."

"Anna Margolin's reputation rests on one slim volume of Yiddish poetry published in New York City in 1929. Her poetry remains remarkably fresh and contemporary in spite of having been written a long time ago: the language is original and personal, and her themes of anxiety, loneliness, and search for identity and meaning are, if anything, more relevant today than they were in her lifetime."

"Margolin's major themes of anxiety, loneliness, and a search for meaning run through all the sections of her book...Anna Margolin's central motifs include her yearning for transcendence, her resistance to the constraints of gender, and the tensions between rigid immobility and graceful movement-between proud, calm exteriors and inner turmoil, between mirror images that mock her and the masks and shawls that conceal her."

"A fiery bohemian, who wrote a passionate, disciplined poetry."

"As a translator of Yiddish, I often find myself confronting the void created by the loss of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews. It was therefore with a sense of urgency as well as obligation that I undertook to make the treasure of Anna Margolin's poetry available in English. I came to the poetry of Anna Margolin as a member of the Yiddish Women Writers' Study Group in Toronto. We began by reading poetry in Yiddish, and Anna Margolin's poems made an immediate powerful impression on me: her images possessed me like a dybbuk. Margolin haunted me for the better part of five years as I tried to understand her work. As I wrote draft translations, I often felt that she was speaking through me and sometimes even for me. During this process, when the meaning of a particularly troubling phrase or image suddenly revealed itself to me, I would experience a sense of "joyous rapture." Rilke used this term to describe the heightened state he found himself in when translating the poetry of Paul Valéry."

"Even though Anna Margolin was far from typical, her life and her writing tell us something about the restlessness and dislocation that marked her and many other Jewish women of her time...Margolin wrote around what Tillie Olsen calls "hidden silences" or "one book silences," publishing journalism for years, then editing a volume of the poetry of others (Dos yidishe lid in amerike (The Yiddish Poem in America), 1923). Her own poetic voice emerged in the single volume Lider, published when she was 42, and even here the images tell of enforced silence, muffled cries, women mute as statues, "madness closing tenderly over [the] throat". Margolin actually felt the silence, writing desperately in letters of pressure in her throat, obstruction; imagining growths, tumors."

"A human being emerges out of her poetry who lives life intensely and sharply. Nothing is lukewarm to her. Everything becomes an elemental, shocking experience drawn from the broadest range of emotions: from the most refined love to the most barbarous hatred, from the deepest servility to proud admiration and contempt, from turbulent dramaticism to calm resignation, from heroic daring to almost childlike fear."

"What is rarely known except by scholars is the range and variety of the pre-Holocaust Ashkenazi communities of Europe: traditional, socialist, communist; Orthodox and secular; capitalist and worker; Yiddish-speaking and/or fluent in the vernacular of wherever they lived: Russian, Polish, French, Czech, German. ... There is a whole literature, not just Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, or Sholem Aleykhem...but also brilliant narrative writers and experimental poets such as Chaim Grade, Kadia Molodowsky, Anna Margolin, Mani Leyb, Itsik Manger, and a host of others."

"Anna Margolin created her own language and style, which even now seems fresh and contemporary."

"There are other ways as well from a linguistic or literary aspect, where you could see how Jewish tradition was being reinvented with a kind of radical lens. For example, Anna Margolin, a Yiddish modernist writer, described herself in a letter where she says, “I've always been an anarchist. I've never been able to be an atheist. Indeed, in times of trouble, I spoke to God and I gave God hell.” And that's one way of modeling the psychological straddling of having grown up with a religious background and then reinventing it in some way towards anarchism."

"She of the cold marble breasts"

"What was she trying to tell me? Did she want to say that life was empty and grey, pitiless in its ordinariness? Like a wicked serpent life wraps its coils around your airy dreams and winged desires, smothering them with its venomous breath, killing them on the spot before they have a chance to bloom. Your struggles will be in vain, your attempts to free yourself from the ordinary, to rise above-life will ridicule and crush you without mercy. Is that what she wanted to say? Or did she want to say that love is small and ephemeral?-A pale spark against the dark back-drop of life; flashing but for a moment, only to vanish in the thick darkness? It cannot open up cloudless, starlit skies; cannot pour blue light over the cloudy paths of life. It is easily extinguished with only a little water; even its purist flame does not burn eternal. Is that what she wanted to say? Or perhaps she wanted to remind me that however beautiful and jubilant life can be, however brightly the sun of love can shimmer, embracing you with its gentle rays, there will always be, standing behind your shoulder, a merciless enemy as old as life itself-death. It stands behind you as you stretch out your hand toward the happiness calling out to you nearby; as you lie in the arms of your ardent beloved and dream of eternity; as you begin a great project and in passionate desires see it through to its end-it is always there behind you, with a cold smile on its bony face, ready to steal away your life, your love, your creative accomplishments-What was she trying to tell me?"

"I know that my devils have knives instead of teeth, and snakes instead of fingers. I can't do very much about that. I can't just get rid of them."

"Drunk from the bitter truth,/I refuse all other wine."

"The creative person wears a mask... just like a sculptor wears an apron.""

"I already had a lover at that time, and whenever a letter from him arrived it brought with it light, lustre, and profound happiness, transforming all the days that followed into one long uninterrupted holiday. I remember one of those days with particular clarity. I'd just been handed a letter from my lover and secluded myself in one of the hidden corners at the far end of the garden to read it. I drank down the words like strong, intoxicating wine; a wave of hot joy enveloped me entirely."

"During the whole journey I thought about my mother. Somehow I now found her easier to understand; I felt closer to her-she had been transformed into a sister in suffering."

"Somewhere in the world, in a city/I am flowering like a lily."

"I am now old and weary. Life storms and seethes just as before, casting incandescent yearnings into human souls, summoning them to happiness and suffering, but life no longer knocks on my door: its waves do not reach as far as my threshold. I have already drained my glass to the very dregs. I am weary. My lonely days, my sleepless nights, pass in peaceful silence-without joy, without pain, without desire. With each new day and each passing night I creep one step closer to eternal peace and calm-to death. And the closer I get to death the more intently my gaze lingers on my tear-soaked, paper-garland-crowned youth. During sleepless nights I see, paraded before me, the shadows of those who bore light or shade in my soul, causing it to quake out of love or hatred."

"Long and sorrowful stretched out those days."