Oh, that's perfect.
When I first came across Say It In Yiddish, , on a shelf in a big chain store in Orange County, California, I couldn't quite believe that it was real. There was only one copy of it, buried in the languages section at the bottom of the alphabet. It was like a book in a story by J. L Borges, unique, inexplicable, possibly a hoax. The first thing that really struck me about it was, paradoxically, its unremarkableness, the conventional terms with which Say It In Yiddish advertises itself on its cover. "No other PHRASE BOOK FOR TRAVELLERS," it claims, "contains all these essential features."
leads eventually to
I can imagine another Yisroel, the youngest nation on the North American continent, founded in the former Alaska Territory during World War II as a resettlement zone for the Jews of Europe. (For a brief while, I once read, Franklin Roosevelt was nearly sold on such a plan.)... It is a cold, northern land of furs, paprika, samovars and one long, glorious day of summer.... This Yisroel--or maybe it would be called Alyeska--is a kind of Jewish Sweden, social-democratic, resource rich, prosperous, organizationally and temperamentally far more akin to its immediate neighbor, Canada, then to its more freewheeling benefactor far to the south. Perhaps, indeed, there has been some conflict, in the years since independence, between the United States and Alyeska.
So that's how it happened. |
