VILNEWS

Highly informative and visually impressive monthly newsletter put out by the Vilnius International Club:

Chronicle of Lithuania, 3rd edition, Jan 2010

DAWN RAFFEL, ANIMATED

Very cool Luca Dipierro’s animation for Dawn Raffel’s upcoming collection of short stories, “Further Adventures in the Restless Universe” (Dzanc Books): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JXULFGiRCo&feature=player_embedded#.

Dawn is a terrific, intense, often tersely experimental and always exceptionally smart writer — and a former SLS-St. Petersburg faculty.

די שפּראַך פון די צוקונפֿט … טאָמער (COURTESY OF THE GOOGLE TRANSLATION TOOL)

Interesting article in the Chicago Tribune on the resurgent popularity of Yiddish: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-talk-grossman-yiddishjan12,0,6963325.story.

Yours Truly doesn’t know any Yiddish, and he would like to learn it, if only, by default, to some basic extent. For his Pale-born maternal grandparents, it was their first language, but they never spoke it in his or his younger brother’s presence, cognizant as they must have been of the fact that having been born Jewish, for the Soviet kids of YT’s generation, was quite enough of a handicap already, even without the confusing and exacerbating influence of the dead language of long-gone non-Soviet, Tzarist-era Jews.