Explaining immigration to children is a challenge. I want my children to have an understanding of the things they hear and the world around them, good and bad. That being said, I also want to protect my child from the most gruesome elements if possible. I turn to books. I have found two recent picture … Continue reading Immigration through the Eyes of a Child
SS Winnipeg was Neruda’s Winged Fugitive Ark for war refugees. Where are such grand gestures today? Stateless and dispossessed persons in the world today amount to a towering 65 million. If we are to trust the "census" of such an unstable and stateless population, it is the highest number of refugees in recorded history (at … Continue reading Valparaíso-Bound: Neruda’s Ark
Don Quixote de La Mancha is the greatest literary work to come from Spain, the first novel, written by the pen of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. It is also one of the most translated books in the world. The novel was published in two volumes, the first book published in 1605 and the second in … Continue reading Don Quixote de La Mancha: Timeless Message of Hope and Chivalry
Rodolfo Walsh’s Open Letter to the Military Junta used to be distributed in Argentina as a pamphlet by the historical memory and human rights organizations in the first decade of this century. Today, after the 2015 election of a historical-revisionist administration in Argentina, the transmission of its message and Walsh’s struggle to the new generations is, again, … Continue reading Reading the Argentinean writer of resistance Rodolfo Walsh in the Trump Era
Hanan Harawi (which in Quechua means “poetry from above) is an independent publishing house specializing in international poetry based in Lima, Peru. According to its founding editor, the poet John Martínez González, Hanan Harawi seeks to connect audiences to a diverse array of contemporary Latin American poets and writers ‘’without blogs, posts, or web-anthologies. While … Continue reading Hanan Harawi’s Insurrection
English-language retellings of Jewish folktales come from many different source languages, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Ladino (the language of the Sephardic Jews) chief among them. This post will present a round-up of some of my favorite storytelling collections, whether translated or otherwise reworked from the oral tradition. Since I work in a Sephardic congregation library, I … Continue reading Jewish Storytelling Sources
In Summer 2015 and 2017 I spent time in Jordan, Israel, and Palestine doing a number of things related to my work as Middle East Studies Librarian at the Michigan State University Libraries. One of my goals was collecting comics, to add to our international comic art collection, a vast and beautifully cataloged and cared-for … Continue reading Collecting Israeli Comics
An interview about poetry, memory, and revolution with Argentinian independent publisher, returned exile and political activist Miguel Martínez Naón. (Arturo Desimone’s series on Latin American Poetry for Anomaly and formerly The Drunken Boat. Republished with permission from Anomaly.) Miguel Martínez Naón is an Argentinian editor who forms part of the independent publisher Lamás Médula, … Continue reading Notes on a Return to the Ever-Dying Lands: The Return of Naón
The past seems to bubble up to the surface more frequently and picturesquely in Lithuania than in other places. The country is famous for its deposits of amber, fossilized tree resin. These golden nuggets are brought up from deep underground, sometimes containing bits of long-dead insects and plants. Lithuania is also the burial ground of … Continue reading Buried Yiddish Treasures in Lithuania
Growing up, I knew very little about Yiddish literature with the exception of The Wise Men of Chelm. My elementary school librarian read us the tales of the people so wise they tried to repopulate a river with canned herring. In middle school, I played Dorothy in the Solomon Schechter production of the Wizard of … Continue reading Even Higher: Three Yiddish Retellings for Children
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 