Bluma

I was sure they said three months when I submitted, but now it says six months and I don’t know, I don’t care anymore.

I think the weaponised incompetence may kill me.

I think the universe is telling me I should finally read Golem.

A row of sailors, all in uniform but for one in a grass skirt and lei who reminds his officer that it’s Purim, after all…

Sometimes the recycling is successful, sometimes not.

I’ve managed to miss out the attribution here somehow, but they use a lot of non-Jewish (and sometimes even serviceman’s publications) as a source.

Oh, I know you know — just saying that if I recall correctly, Goldberg’s not the only ‘name’ that gets recycled there

There are quite a few of these recycled and relabelled cartoons in Tog (and you’ll see Dr Seuss ads for ‘Flit,’ too)— they do seem to happen more often in the war years, but generally anytime Foshko’s on vacation.

Is it bad when even the kids think your life choices are questionable?

My kid: Are you good at what you do?

Me: Lol, no.

My kid: I thought you said if you practiced something a lot, you’d get good at it?

Me: I say a lot of things, kid. Why are you hung up on that and not ‘eat your damn dinner already’?

Ok, Rothschilds this, Rothschilds that, but you tell me you honestly don’t want a carriage pulled by freakin’ zebras.

And there’s my dictionary gone past the point of tape and glue.

I am a very bad typist!

Typo — lucky-dip bag…it’s like a mystery bag of crap. You get them all kinds of places.

I find it very difficult not to go into detail about how very freaked out I am at people now claiming human sacrifice, satanic rituals and cannibalism really happened in the Epstein files — as a Jew myself.

But I realise that is not bank behaviour.

The guy at the bank yesterday told me he wouldn’t take an American passport these days if he won it in a free lucky-dip back, so that is something.

Nobody told me the Olympic curling starts tomorrow and I am married to a curler and please just put me down now.

Oh, I know, I know….as a reader, though, it frustrates me.

(And I think there are enough people who would accept the art while rejecting the translation to be annoyed by it.)

I have been particularly cross off late at the use of AI by Yiddishists.

The same people who would reject (I sincerely hope) machine translation, in a community of folks who are also very visual-art inclined community (in my experience) are churning out yellow-hued AI rubbish.

Biz 120

I personally don’t like or use the word often, but goyim have grammar issues I can’t fix.

All in all, my lifestyle choice of long-dead writers is paying off.

I think we may have reached the point where I remind folks I basically have a Roman altar in my back garden and can be convinced to take sacrifice requests…

Leivick develops this maid thing a couple times, spinning it out into a set of poems about Don Quixote about 25 years later.

Because what, for instance, can a Shneour, for example, or a Rosenfeld, or a Shmaryahu Levin, when hungry, get out of that old, aristocratic mistress, out of Hebrew, apart from two figs from R’ Tsadik and a whiff of besamim cloves, and sometimes not even that, just a bit of hard parchment. Well, you make do and still your hunger with things like that. But with the maid, it’s a pleasure. She’s big-hearted. She pays with dollars, and dollars can buy everything in the world. Besides, it’s cozy, too. You don’t have to sit all done up in the parlour, but you slip into the kitchen. And when you get into the kitchen, you get a good piece of black bread with butter, a tasty bit of jam, a pot of hot coffee and cake. And then you can embrace her, the maid, even kiss her, and sometimes spend the whole night with her. As it needs to be. In warmth. In open affection. And what can you do with the rich mistress? Kneel before her, at most. Nothing more.

Now this *is* mostly sarcastic, but it’s still wonderful and vivid.

And he follows it up with a description of the maid serving up blinis not from the over with preserves, butter and cream and…

I amaze myself with what I’ll do out of spite sometimes.

Last signed article from Vokh (those some of the unsigned pieces may also have been Leivick’s, I won’t know unless I get into archives at some point.)

I live in hope of digitisation and cling to my couple bits that have been.

I think my first ‘free‘ day after having my first kid was ‘Grand Budapest Hotel.’ It was in France, the guy who took my ticket teased me about seeing an English film and I cried through the whole thing.

Wonderful.

Vokh update: Now absolutely *gutting* the entrants of a poetry competition for their personal statements.

“throw away the ‘absorbed’ with all the rest, with the spheres and the emotions and all the other nonsense — don’t write introductions, for the love of God, write poems!”

And then he goes on to talk about bribery — seeing union bosses come by for hundred of dollars…which was quite an impressive sum then!

I am affected, for example, by the fact that I never see a pretty young woman reading a Yiddish newspaper or book on the subway or the El— this affects me as sadly and fatally as the greatest anti-Yiddish proclamations; the case of a Jewish family that lived together in the same house with me in the mountains one summer who became unfriendly to me and my wife and child because we would speak in Yiddish, and not just unfriendly, but simply stopped speaking to and even greeting me — this case, this extraordinary hatred, had as great and decisive an effect on me as, for instance, all those articles by Ford at the time, all the agitation about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I’m talking about myself, but I’m certain I’m expressing a general experience. Like, for instance — when years ago, when I worked as a paperhanger and belonged to the Paperhanger Local 490, I used to go, as the custom is, to the meetings of the Local. Those were my first years in America, and I couldn’t speak any English and it was difficult for me to understand English. The Jewish labour movement in Americas was a new, fresh phenomenon for me after years of Siberian isolation and solitude. The whole Local 490 consisted almost entirely of Jews, most of them as half-green as me. How surprised I was every time I went to a meeting of the Local to see how a couple of leaders sat on the stage, giving speeches, carrying out accountings, holding votes, collecting money, reading out punishments and judgements and excluding whoever was needed — and all in English! And there in the hall sat the crowd, not understanding, eyes glazed-over, hard-working, half-exhausted, half-annoyed, mute, accepting everything in silence. And when I oftentimes asked ‘Why don’t they conduct the business in Yiddish?’ they all looked at me as if I was crazy — what did I mean, Yiddish?

Happy Joyce’s birthday to all you reprobates who celebrate.