Free Republic

MINSK -- Dmitry Slepovich spends weeks at a time traveling the Belarusian countryside, recording for posterity a Jewish musical tradition that genocide, emigration and old age have nearly extinguished. "The memory of Yiddish song is being swallowed up," bemoaned Slepovich, 27, who makes recordings of melodies sung in Yiddish, the traditional language of Eastern Europe's Jews. Slepovich, who plays the clarinet in a Jewish folk band and studies at the music academy in the Belarusian capital Minsk, has already taped dozens of hours of singing by more than 100 elderly singers since he began in 2001. His band, Minsker Kapelye...

The Gooseberry LayFrom "Getting Away with Murder," by Erle Stanley Gardner, in The Atlantic, Vol. 215 No. 1 (1965). Dashiell Hammet, on the other hand, was one of the few writers I have known who had all the earmarks of genius and the temperament which goes with it. For a brief period he was a Pinkerton detective, and because of this experience, he dazzled credulous editors with a presumably encyclopedic knowledge of the underworld. Dashiell was also a fast hand with a dictionary of criminalese and had a vast knowledge of the editorial psychology. Heaven knows how these dictionaries of...

NEW YORK - See Dick and Jane. See Dick and Jane get a lawyer. Pearson Education, the publishing company that owns the copyright to the single-named stars of countless reading primers, is suing a division of Time Warner for co-opting the characters in a book called "Yiddish With Dick and Jane," according to The New York Times. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, claims the book violates Pearson's copyright. The book, which has sold more than 100,000 copies since it was published in September by Little, Brown & Company, is billed as a parody. Not so,...

In a way, catching a ride is how it all began. Fleeing the threat of Portuguese violence, 23 Jewish refugees boarded the Sainte Catherine, a ship that was setting sail for New Amsterdam. They arrived in the Dutch colony almost exactly 350 years ago on Sept. 12, 1654. They were hardly welcomed with open arms, at least not by the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who tried to expel these "blasphemers of the name of Christ." But enough of his superiors in the Dutch West India Company thought otherwise: the Jews were allowed to stay, becoming the founding members of what would...

<p>March 15, 2004 -- Dr. Seuss' original classic and the Yiddish version.</p> <p>Cat in the, uh, yarmulke.</p> <p>A Manhattan couple has launched a home-publishing business - with a Yiddish translation of Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat."</p> <p>The translation helps mark this year's 100th anniversary of the birth of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel, a k a Dr. Seuss.</p>

If you're a traditionalist, you probably don't. "In the shtetl," where Eastern European Jews' language of preference developed, "there weren't such things," says Miriam Hoffman, professor of Yiddish and Yiddish literature at Columbia University. No computers, no Internet, no on-line features that perused databases.