Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
A Hot Shabbat Day
It was Shabbat morning. I was still lying in bed. My mother was already up and awake, wearing her clean white headdress. The other bed opposite mine, where my mother would sleep, was already made…
Yiddish Literature and Its Writers
It has been a long time since things have been this lively in the little Yiddish literary world of Russia. Our young writers have crowned the current period in Jewish life with the name “Cultural…
Tenant Number 88
Some sort of strange, humid day. . . . Some sort of day with a ragged sun and low, dark clouds, like threads of smoke, already happened once before in the past: in distant years long ago, when our…
Nicolo-Peccavi, or The Dreyfus Affair at Carpentras
It was, in fact, our aunt who had commissioned the bus. Madame Léa Josué Chanaan was our aunt and we called her Aunt Chanaan, just as we called her husband, Monsieur Josué Chanaan, our uncle, although…
Meetings and Partings, Friends and Strangers
I came to say good-bye. I was going away to the University of Missouri. My grandfather turned from the window at which he sat, looking across the lots at the parkway. To eyes used to…
Jew Boy
Olive liked her new job very much. She had never before tasted such rich, well-cooked food in her life. She put on weight. She was contented.
There wasn’t too much work; just cleaning the…
Julie and the Miracle
People like to get something for their money, doing business is entertainment as well, and indeed there would be precious little fun to be got out of life in Polana if it were not so. It is equally…
Introduction to Ben Ish Ḥai’s Sefer da‘at u-tevunah (Book of Knowledge and Understanding)
This work is an anthology of various texts that provide precious foundations, crucial for the knowledge of the wisdom of kabbalah, hidden secrets that were revealed through the mightiest of heroes…
The Mound
After you, the killed of the Ukraine;After you, butcheredIn a mound in Gorodishche,The Dnieper town . . .KaddishNo! Heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards.Out of my mouth’s brown streams of…
Unsatiated Passions
Unsatiated passions want to be satiated,
Arms wish to be tired,
Lips look for merging,
Fingers long for cracking,
Green fires in the eyes are greening greener,
Like eyes of wolves in frozen fields,
G…
Yiddish Folk Songs with Their Original Airs: Introduction
The songs that are found in the following collection are genuine folk songs: folk songs in the fullest sense of the word. These songs are now being published for the first time. After having wandered…