Foreward Jacob Kohn (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. 188 pages. 10 x 7 inches. Blank endpaper has the rubber stamp impression of the fabled Bernard Morgenstern bookshop on the lower east side many decades ago. There is a reference to it in the following: Dovid Katz on Ber Borokhov's Philology and Literary History. "When I was three, we moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Safad, Galilee, where my father, Yiddish poet Menke Katz, hoped the 16th-century kabbalists would inspire him (and they did). But it all came apart a few days before my fourth birthday. We were hauled in by a police officer for "speaking Yiddish in public", such was the antipathy towards the language in Israel then. The chief of police apologised profusely and opened a bottle of wine. But that very night, Menke (as I called him from an early age) said (in Yiddish, of course): "Dovid! We're going back to New York!" I was quixotically determined to find a calling that would "be good" for the survival of Yiddish. My first year at Columbia, with all its "requirements" (from astronomy to track), gave no scope. One of my favourite escapes was walking through the Lower East Side (an equivalent of sorts to London's Whitechapel). I stumbled into Bernard Morgenstern's Jewish bookshop at 150 East Broadway. Only old Morgenstern could remove a book from the middle of one of the huge stacks without it toppling. There was a big sign in Yiddish and English: "Do Not Touch Anything!" (Signs on the Lower East Side never said "Please".) " Some wear to very top and bottom of outer spine strip.