Jews From The United States

"I admire your language and your flights of fancy. Some of your metaphors are truly astounding. You are absolutely unique. I would recognize anything of yours blindfolded. In your hand, realism is always transmuted into poetry. Even in translation, your language sings out."

"I admire the beauty and concision of your language. You are so economical and careful not to waste a word! And most important: the precision with which you analyze the human soul, women’s souls, your own soul."

"She eats with obedient earnestness down to the very last crumb, as if she were finishing praying."

"Everything you write is not only well written, but also interesting and easy to read. These qualities don’t always go together, but in your work they do."

"I’m glad you’ve undertaken to have your work translated into English. It’s important both for you and for Yiddish literature. The world should see what we’re made of, and know that we’re no less modern than other literatures."

"How well you know people, how clearly you see them inside and out! How romantic, visionary, and thoughtful you are—you know daily life so well, you see it so splendidly, and you describe it with both a poetic tongue and a realistic flair for detail."

"no one's good luck lasts forever."

"the garden rewards me for my efforts. Red and yellow roses lift their faces to me, and the grass is green. Everything wants to live and to thrive. It’s a Jewish garden, with a little of this and a little of that. Everything comes together harmoniously."

"The unwritten letters are the most interesting; they come spontaneously, straight from the heart, and swim away with all the unwritten stories, the uninvented poems."

"How wonderful to have a friend who reads, who understands, who offers a critical word that hits the nail on the head."

"in a certain sense maybe I am a recluse. For me it’s enough to write a story and have it appear in a journal. Beyond that, being in public scares me. bl"

"Don’t worry that at the moment you’re not writing. Live a little! Nothing will be lost—it will come back to you with interest when you’re back at your desk"

"At times I feel very pessimistic—for whom are we writing? Then I think of you—you, who give so much and receive so little, who go on with your work—and in Yiddish! Who am I to complain? bl"

"I salute you as a writer and urge you to write and write, for the good of Yiddish literature. Because your intellect, your fresh words and images, the flights of your creativity, are original, contemporary, and I would say zaftik [juicy]! We need you!"

"A person would not be able to live in this world if not for the bit of goodness that he has seen with his own eyes-this is what Tulye Shor said to me."

"“You must understand,” she [Mrs. Zagretti] says, “the fly was a kind of soul mate for me. Whenever I came home it flew to greet me. It followed me from room to room. At night when I got into bed it would circle around the night light. Around and around and around — it must have hatched in late summer so that its life was just beginning when all the others of its species had already died. I could feel the tragedy of being left all alone in the world — all ties severed and paths overgrown, all friends and relations annihilated without a trace, condemned by fate to live out its one and only life in anguish . . .” Betty wants to say that she knows many people who were orphaned and left alone in the world not because of a mistake in the calendar but because of the calculated, brutal, organized murder of a people."

"“A house without a picture, my mother used to say, is like a heart without a god,” Mrs. Zagretti says. “When I pray to God, I need a picture in front of my eyes.” “We Jews carry God in our hearts,” Betty replies with an edge in her voice."

"dancing around the tree as if it were a pagan god."

"When a person lies in a fever, he keeps nothing hidden. When a person's head is burning, his tongue loosens."

"In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike... Female prose writers, such as Fradl Shtok, Esther Kreitman, Rokhl Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, and Khava Rosenfarb, also deepened the awareness and understanding of the feminine contribution to Jewish civilization... In the realm of poetry, four female writers deserve special mention: Miriam Ulinover, Kadia Molodowsky, Rokhl Korn, and Rajzel Zychlinsky...Kadia Molodowsky's life in Yiddish literature took her from Poland to the Soviet Union, and from the United States to Israel and back. She made lasting contributions to the short story, the novel, the essay, and children's literature. In the United States,she also founded and edited the literary journal Svive. Her most important and original work, however, was in poetry. She was simultaneously the voice of traditional Jewish motherhood and of the struggling modern Jewish woman confronting ideas, emotions, disappointments, and hopes. Her philosophical poems, Holocaust poems, poems about Jerusalem, and children's poems are particularly noteworthy."

""Anyone who says that figs from a can are as good as figs from a tree isn’t worthy of a real, natural fruit — a fruit grown without chemicals or artificial fertilizer, a fruit as God created it." (Mrs. Zagretti)"

"“Life, my dear, is a garden full of all kinds of plants,” Mrs. Zagretti said. “People, too, are plants that must be cultivated if they are to reach their highest potential.”"

"The friendship has never crossed over the fence...The garden was the intermediary that brought them together. As the garden blossomed, so did the friendship — but never did it cross their thresholds."

""I understand people, maybe not with my brains but with something my ancestors planted in me." (Mrs. Zagretti)"

"I loved the newspaper work, but I like fiction better. Newspaper writing is fine but it doesn’t do to stay at it too long."

"Writing is lonely work but the creative writer is rarely alone. The room in which one works is peopled with the men and women and children of the writer’s imagination … Often they are so much more fascinating to the writer than the living people one actually encounters that to go to a party, a dinner, even to the company of chosen people created by oneself."

"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

"Of course I can’t write all the time. Some days I sit and sit and SIT at my machines and not a word will come. But I sit there and if it is possible I write something, it doesn’t matter what. The next day I may have to tear it up, but often what I think is very poor the first day turns out to be usable in spots."

"It is monstrous that a single pathological madman should, in a world we thought civilized, bring down indescribable agony, humiliation and death upon hundreds of thousands of people of one religion; a religion which, persecuted through the centuries, has welded its followers into something akin to a race. As though under some evil spell the countries of the world have stood by while this latest savagery has gone on. Of course the German Jew belongs in Germany as long as he cares to remain there, just as the Italian Jew belongs in Italy, the English Protestant belongs in England, the Swedish Lutheran belongs in Sweden. Suppose that the United States were dictator ruled (which is unthinkable). And suppose that that dictator were to announce to an amazed world that the Presbyterians or the Episcopalians or the Baptists or the Lutherans or the Catholics were the cause of all the ills that had come upon America; that they were swine, dogs, thieves, impure of blood-all that is vile; and that they must leave the country forthwith, penniless and homeless, to wander until they died. This would be as reasonable, as just, as sane as that which has come upon the Jews of Germany, and which may well be visited upon the Jews of other European countries if this barbarism is permitted to go on. It is a world I do not recognize."

"Perhaps the dreaded moment has come now to call it a failure. Or perhaps the pulse that still beats here in these United States will save the body of the Earth from the death that hovers so close. This new world, vast, rich, brilliant, electric, is sick too with the other organs and members of the whole planet. A continent to which, for centuries, the persecuted, the frightened, the poor, the courageous, the ambitious, the unafraid could come by the millions to find freedom and a new life is now contaminated by the old-world sickness so that it cries, in its delirium, "Down with the rich, down with the poor! Down with the Jews, down with the Catholics! Down with the freedom of the press, down with freedom of speech, down with freedom of worship!" Down, then, with everything that brought to this country the Huguenots, the Pilgrims, the Quakers; the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Catholics, the Jews; the Irish, Italian, Turkish, English, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Russian, Greek, German, Bohemian, Austrian people. The North American continent they had for the taking; a vast world on which they were free to have such land as pleased them, where they might worship as they pleased, where they might walk, talk, laugh, sing, play, work as they pleased. I sometimes think, with pain, of what it might mean to the persecuted minorities of Europe today if suddenly, out of the Atlantic, there should rise a vast and gleaming virgin continent to which they, like our own ancestors here in America-yours and mine-could go for safety and healing. But there is no Columbus now, and no new land for refuge. And laughter has gone out of the world. A lovely sound, laughter. It has been banished by a madman with a comic mustache, himself subject for laughter. So perhaps millions will perish again for the lack of one spirit to revive the inner spirit of all. Sometimes, as I have listened to the wise and humane words of the man Franklin Roosevelt, I have thought that he alone, in these past five hideous years, has had the courage and the vision and the skill to try to devise a cure for a sick and dying world. But the measures he is taking require almost super-human effort, for he must fight the virulent hatred of the very rich, and the inertia caused by the white blood corpuscles of the very poor, and the curious indifference of the vast American middle class."

"I am like a disappointed in love woman-in her love of the human race. For myself it does not matter, for I have seen another world; the world that was before the year 1914. All my life I have lived, walked, talked, worked as I wished. I should refuse to live in a world in which I could no longer say this. Since 1933 the whole German people have been slaves. And in those years not a line of beautiful poetry, not a page of stirring or important imaginative writing, not a piece of great or even good music, not a single fine painting has come out of the German nation. At the thought there floods over one an overwhelming gratitude for freedom of the spirit, freedom of the mind, freedom of the soul, freedom of the body. It has been my privilege, then, to have been a human being on the planet Earth; and to have been an American, a writer, a Jew. A lovely life I have found it, and thank you, Sir. So come Revolution! Come Hitler! Come Death! Even though you win-you lose."

"Short stories are the form of youth. You must have a plot, a situation, and distinctive characters. You take this and throw it away in a few thousand words when it could be made into a novel. That is very unthrifty, and it is not fair to the characters. They need more space."

"New life must come from within. As for contentment-I don't even want it."

"I have lived in the best of all possible worlds; the only world, so far as we know, on which human beings can live and have their being; it has been my privilege to be a human being on the planet Earth. There is, for me, something fantastic in the idea of being here at all. Always I have felt a little incredulous of the whole business."

"I am not so naïve as to be oblivious of evil and ugliness, but I thought that the bulk of the human race wanted, deep down, to be good if only they could, somehow. A childish belief, perhaps. But I shrink from relinquishing it. I am not astonished at brutality, nor at the weak yielding to it. I know that man belongs to the animal kingdom. But I know, too, that he is superior to other animals through the possession of that intangible something called the spirit. Just as I believe that God is Good and that Good is God, so I believe that Good (and therefore God) lives within each of us. Each one of us is not only an animal, but a spirit. And for that reason alone (though there are a thousand others) I marvel that every decent human being does not reject the spiritual murder which accompanies the scourge of Fascism, Nazism and Communism. Of the three, the Nazi plan will perish first, not because of the Nazi brutality, but because of the Nazi vulgarity and insolence. As in 1914 (and always) the German nation now reckons mathematically without considering the human equation. A mistake."

"the habit of years is not easily overcome."

"This is certain: I never have written a line except to please myself. I never have written with an eye to what is called the public or the market or the trend or the editor or the reviewer. Good or bad, popular or unpopular, lasting or ephemeral, the words I have put down on paper were the best words I could summon at the time to express the thing I wanted more than anything else to say."

"She seized hungrily upon the stray crumbs of conversation that fell to her."

"It takes a determined woman to make tea biscuit for no one but herself."

"She seemed to put an enormous amount of energy into those cleanings-as if they were a sort of safety valve."

"All my writing life I have written to please first myself. Never, except wartime, have I written to order on a theme or subject definitely requested or suggested. But war, to me, is not life at all. It is an excrescence, a cancer on the body of civilization."

"It is difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story. In a novel one can be dull for pages and still get away with it. It is, to me, an interesting and baffling fact that today, more than thirty years after The Homely Heroine was written, it still is as difficult for me to write a short story (or anything, for that matter) as it was when first I began. A single short story may take a month, six weeks, two months to write. Usually, the easier they are to read the harder they are to write. Often a short story theme may take a year of conscious and subconscious thinking before it is ripe for writing. Sometimes a possible short story seems too tough to be worth the fight. But it stays around, taunting you, daring you to come on, and finally you write it to be rid of it...In some cases the reader may feel, after reading a short story, approximately the sensation he has experienced after having too hastily eaten a heavy meal. He has treated a dinner as a snack and his digestion rebels."

"During World War I and World War II, I wrote few short stories. I wrote, in fact, little of anything other than propaganda, and for ordered propaganda writing I have scant ability. Thousands of fictional so-called war stories were written. Few possessed the slightest value. The best, in my opinion, were those published in The New Yorker during World War II. Some of these were brilliant, courageous, and carried a terrific impact."

"All the way from Maugham and de Maupassant and Chekhov to Ring Lardner the short story has served to portray the characteristics, the habits, the manners, the morals, the emotions of a nation, a whole people. Certainly I knew no such highfalutin arguments as these when first I began to write short stories. I wrote short stories for the same reason that a child has who begins to walk after he has learned to stand up and to balance himself. It was for me the next natural step following newspaper reporting. I still think it is one of the most exhilarating and the most difficult forms of the writing art. When a reader says, "Oh, only a short story!" he has me to fight. There is something about the pace of the short story that catches the tempo of this country. If it is written with sincerity and skill it portrays a mood, a character, a background, or a situation. Sometimes it is not only typically American, it is universal in its feeling; sometimes its inherent truth is not a thing of the month, but of the years. When this is true, that short story is as genuinely a classic as any novel or play or piece of music."

"Early in my short-story career I hit upon the character of a traveling saleswoman named Mrs. Emma McChesney. I never had met or seen a traveling saleswoman and I don't know why I named her Emma McChesney, but she became enormously popular and very nearly turned out to be my undoing. The first story, entitled Representing T. A. Buck, was published in the American Magazine in 1911. I hadn't meant to write a series, but at the urging of the editors I tried a second, called Roast Beef Medium. Well, that did it. The American businesswoman, inexplicably enough, had not been presented in fiction. This now seems incredible, but it was so. The magazine-reading public took Emma to its heart...Emma was hearty, salty, good as gold (better), and oh, so courageous. She was fine in her day, but this is not it; she is as dated as the Featherloom Petticoats she sold..."

"The persecution, torture, and death of six million European Jews had actually brought little or no protest from a Christian world whose religion was based on the teachings of a Jew."

"The writer given to rereading his or her past work is a writer in danger. Once you begin to mumble among your souvenirs you're through. Any writer who is properly a writer is working as long as he is alive or awake. It is virtually impossible for a writer to ride in the subway or on a bus, walk on the street or down a country road, telephone, read a book, talk, listen, breathe, without consciously or unconsciously sustaining the act of writing, in his mind at least. The analytical creative mind goes click-click-click while it is awake-and sometimes while it is asleep. It makes the writer's life interesting but somewhat feverish. Frequently one wishes it were possible to turn off the machinery that is eternally registering, collecting, discarding, filing. Writers are a tired lot, for the most part; and no wonder. It would be pleasant to know that these stories, some born long ago, others still young, have the strength and vitality to make new friends and even to renew old friendships. The writer herself is fond of them, or they would not be here. But the feeling is much that of a parent whose sons and daughters have married and gone off into the world. There they are, on their own at last, sink or swim, live or die. The author is finished with them, everything she can do for them has been done. And a new infant, not yet strong enough to walk alone, waits to be shown a way of life."

"It is a pattern of self-immolation familiar to any writer worth reading. The writer does not even remotely look upon this as a hardship. It is a way of life; a necessary an chosen way of life. Witty conversation, purposely dull dialogue, love, murder, marriage, birth, violence, triumph, failure, death—anything can happen in that room."

"Molodovsky, who knew the Jewish sources and spent many years teaching in Jewish schools, turned poetry into a conduit through which the biblical matriarchs could express their fellow feeling for every kind of sorrow"

"The sharp-tongued Kitty O’Hara used to say that being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling."