Thursday's Flurry of Words

Pilot Mountain in North Carolina

Yesterday we explored regionalism in language, specifically our personal region — the American South. Geographically speaking, Larry Brown’s Mississippi is far different from our genteel South Carolina and even our second home, the backwoods mountains of North Carolina. Inspired by yesterday’s post, we’re starting today’s flurry with an article on the current state of another language, Yiddish. Next, we remember an oft-forgotten German author, Heinrich von Kleist, and then check out some Soviet-era art. James Wood reviews The Privileges and Union Atlantic, books that explore ethics and money, and The Millions trumpets its new cause: Dave Eggers as Editor of the Paris Review. How’s that for regionalism? – Andrew Geer

– On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard’s famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the German invasion of September 1. To stage the current production its co-directors, Debra Caplan, a Harvard graduate student of Yiddish and Cecilia Raker, an undergraduate concentrator in drama, assembled a cast willing to learn their parts in a language most of them had never heard. — Yiddish in Minding The Campus

– Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) only wrote eight stories, but they are among the glories of German, and world, literature. The best known to American readers is almost certainly the novella-length “Michael Kohlhaas,” in large part because E. L. Doctorow borrowed from it for the Coalhouse Walker portions of his novel Ragtime. — Heinrich von Kleist in Barnes & Noble Book Reviews

– Now that the dreary and dismal Bolshevik autocracy has been replaced by a colorful and freewheeling capitalist oligarchy, the artifacts and residue of the Soviet years are likely to be viewed more as a de-clawed feline or venom-less viper than echoes of plague years—or, in capitalism’s ultimate triumph, as collectible commodities. — Red Star Over Russia in The Morning News

All Quiet On The Eastern Front

– In his 1844 manuscripts, Karl Marx writes about money as an agent of inversion. Once I have money, Marx says, I am no longer bound by my individuality: “I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. I, in my character and as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and therefore so is its possessor.” — Jonathan Dee & Adam Haslett in The New Yorker

– It’s a business-school truism that great leaders make for messy successions. Not only are their shoes hard to fill; no boss likes to contemplate his or her own obsolescence. (Think of Steve Jobs. Hell, think of King Lear.) And though its masthead is more likely to have graduated from Brown than from Wharton, the literary magazine is as subject as any other enterprise to the general principle. — Dave Eggers & The Paris Review in The Millions

Video: Dave Eggers’ TED Speech