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371 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
Thereafter, making sense of the books in my care became for me an obsessive preoccupation, not least of all because, as I learned to read, I was learning also about a culture immensely appealing to a fallen Catholic like myself. For if Yiddish writers had one thing in common, I discovered, it was the kind of passionate irreligiosity that can only be found among those who'd been born, raised, and sickened by spiritual tradition. In a poem by Malpesh's contemporary Jacob Glatshteyn, a line struck me as few ever have: The God of my unbelief is magnificant. (p. 5)
"A man is in his pants what he is not in his heart." (p. 41)
"Do you know this word? It is the sudden turn of the story or poem, when all at once the writer's meaning is revealed. In English, knaytch is the 'twist.' It is the same word a baker might use if he is making a pastry. But a writer is not a baker. A writer should be more like a butcher. And not just a butcher but a shoykhet (ritual butcherer)....
Do you know what kind of a knife a shoykhet uses? When a shoykhet kills an animal, he must select the right blade--a halaf--for the size of the beast. It may not be the sharpest knife, or the most deadly, but it is the most graceful.
A writer's work is not very different. Faced with poems and stories of all sizes, one uses whatever style is most graceful at the time...." (p. 177)