Category: Current events
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Aharon Pick’s memoir has been translated
The project that began in 2020 to translate the Holocaust memoir written by my grandfather’s childhood friend, Aharon Pick, has come to fruition. Indiana University Press published the English version, using Pick’s original title, “Notes from the Valley of Slaughter.” It is available from the publisher or via Amazon. Here is the publisher’s website with…
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Aharon Pick’s Diary
Here’s what I’ve been up to: As a young man, my grandfather had a friend named Aharon Pick. The two of them collaborated on a project to collect Yiddish folksongs in and around their hometown, Keidan, in Lithuania. My grandfather emigrated to the U.S. in 1904; Aharon Pick went to France, where he graduated from…
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A 50-year civil war?
Jill Lepore argues in The New Yorker that the Kent State shootings, of which today is the 50-year anniversary, followed by those at Jackson State in Mississippi, followed by the “Hard Hat Riot” in New York (in which construction workers beat up student antiwar protesters) began a civil war that continues today, with Trump’s shock…
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Empathy Check
Josef Stalin is supposed to have said, “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.” You can decide where 97,000 — roughly the number of deaths from COVID-19 that have been recorded thus far — falls on that spectrum, but it seems clear that we have entered a zone in which the…
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Dr. Golden Hands
The piece triggered a powerful memory for me from June, 1999: My dad, then aged 79, was in Columbia-Presbyterian, being operated on for a life-threatening condition called aortic stenosis;
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The Joy(?) of Yiddish
Yiddish humor, it’s often said, is about laughing to keep the darkness away. I’m sure I’m not the first to make this connection, which is funny (in the classic Yiddish manner) but requires explanation. (How can a joke be funny if you have to explain it? I don’t know; ask a comedian.) First, you need…
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Covid thoughts
When my children were growing up, I noticed that, no matter what else I was doing, a small part of my brain was constantly occupied with a single question: Like a constant radio signal, or background hum, sporadically heard but always there. “Is it safe enough?” Not simply “Is it safe?” because of course there…
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