Thaïs Miller

Apr 26, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Thaïs Miller |Akiva Schick |Stuart Schoffman |Abraham Sutzkever

The Yiddish instructor brought out a box of cutout paper letters and asked his teaching assistant to arrange them in alphabetical order inside a plastic box. The assistant struggled a bit. The instructor, whom I will call Mikołaj, turned to me and said, “You know the alphabet. Can you help us?” We were speaking to each other mostly in Yiddish with a little English when we hit a roadblock in our understanding. “Sure,” I said, wondering how he was going to use them.