Ie

excerpt Motto: Prophetic utterance comes into being via negation: it is the knowledge induced by ashes. In the aftermath of speaking the word entrusted to them, prophets taste the ashes of the world upon their tongues; their wisdom is the aftertaste of ashes.   A portraitMany

excerpts . . . Chaplin. Einstein, Rubinstein, Chagall, Spinoza. I summon these exalted spirits above all because their proximity feels good; their genius, both innocent and supple, has a wholesome quality about it, and their absence from any intellectual banquet worthy

A Jew doing commerce once travelled as farAs Constantinople, to search the bazaar. Since he meant to replenish his earthenware stock,He bought many a cup, and many a crock. He kept buying and buying, and just wouldn't stopTill he filled a large creel right up to the

I was about 6 years old when I heard that Hitler refused to congratulate Jesse Owens at Berlin Olympics. I am one of those who knew that Hitler was the hideous name of a bad man, and Jesse Owens – a kind Negro who ran faster and jumped further than anybody. Hitler could

Lilac-less is your hair, your beautiful face in the looking glass. From one eye to the other glides the cloud, like Sodom toward Babel:like leafage it scatters the tower and foams round the sulfur thicket.  Then a lightning twitches your mouth – that den with violin splinters.

Black milk of dawn we drink you in the eveningwe drink you at noon and in the morning and we drink you at nightwe drink and drinkwe dig a hole in the air where one lies comfortablyA man lives in the house who plays with the snakes and writeshe writes when it grows dark in

There were Jews in Bucovina even before its existence as a separate province. As early as the 18th century, some Jewish families in the German area looked for a better life in this northern part of Moldavia, which subsequently became Bucovina. Here they were given more protection

The baptized JewIn the late 1990s I had planned to include at the end of my book The Imaginary Jew in Romanian Culture a chapter entitled The Baptized Jew. As I worked on this subject I realized that it had been extensively discussed by the historian Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu

excerpt Two people went down the chimney in a house. Only one of them got his face dirty with soot. The dirty one looked at the clean one and didn't imagine that he might look different, so he didn't wash the soot away. The clean one, on the other hand, saw the

* The boom of geographic discoveries and trading expeditions that began on the eve of the Renaissance and continued throughout that era developed a new taste for describing remote, if not downright imaginary, countries and peoples. Before being discovered, the savage was

excerpts Motto: It is known that, when a people is about to disappear, first its high society disappears, and with it the literature. (Milorad Pavici, The Khazar Dictionary) Lazar Saineanu and his studies in folklore. An ethnographic controversyLazar Saineanu was a very

excerpts Beyond any currents, interpretations and influences, Judaism brought at least three fundamental principles to the basis of European culture: the secularization of the eternal, the ennoblement of matter through spirit, and the consideration of the human being as