First, a sweet and prosperous New Year to all readers, past, present, and future.

“Children!” begins this greeting manufactured by the Williamsburg Post Card Company in World War I-era New York. After that I’m a bit at sea…the font is beyond me. Last year I took two wonderful terms of Yiddish at YIVO in Manhattan. Studying Yiddish as a beginner inspired me with a tremendous fondness and respect for the language–and a determination to learn it better someday. I also wound up removing the better part of the Yiddish that had found its way into LAMENT by then; I’d learned and been humbled.

Three printed Yiddish sentences, widely spaced in the text, remained vital. Test copies of this summer’s first print edition arrived with the Yiddish all wrong–which prompted me to do a full proof reading, a productive but long process. In the end, the print and some digital editions read okay now. But Amazon KDP has defeated me. The Yiddish lines in that Kindle edition are messed up. My apologies! Properly, they should read:

פרוי און מוטער

?ווער וועט ליבע מיר

 אין אָ רעגן-שייַכעס װינטל שושקען די בערעזע בלעטער 

(Wife and mother. Who will love me? And a line about birch trees.)