Isaac Leib Peretz (1852 – 1915)
Polish-born author and poet who is counted among the three great classical writers in the Yiddish language.
Who tells the truth needs no fancy phrases.
A letter depends on how you read it, a melody on how you sing it.
[Christianity] is a denial of this world, a severance from reality, an abdication, a means of redemption from, not for, life.
Don't look up to heaven, for what will you see in the sky, except stars, luminous but cold, wholly insensitive to pity?
At the Throne of Glory it is not the nobly-born that are beloved, but the nobly-risen.
Rather a stone, but to be alone!
One God, one Law, one people, and one land.
"May all unite to do Thy will with a perfect heart!"... Thus prays the Jew. Have you more beautiful prayers to offer?
You are the weakest and the least, and the last to be redeemed.... You will be freed, when man will rise above the earthly, when human worms will turn into human eagles.
In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against "might makes right"!
I want to soar the boundless blue
Where winds and tempests have their birth,
And let the clouds conceal for me
Not heaven, but the earth.
A stranger's rose is but a thorn.
The bigger the merchant the smaller the Jew.
Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears.
The worst dog gets the best bone.
The soul is imprisoned in the body, and the Lord... built two windows in the wall of the prison... Unfortunately, the windows have curtains—eyelids; and a man whose soul is impure, feeling himself scrutinized, lets down the curtains and conceals the soul.
[About loyalty to Judaism] Don't assume, Jewish intellectuals, that you are doing your duty by working... for so-called Humanity.... You are lighting a fire beneath the open sky, while your own family in your own house is freezing.
A Jew waits for Messiah to come and redeem the world from fear and pain, from the cataclysmic conflicts between rich and poor. All shall enjoy the earth. This means, in popular imagination, that bread and clothes shall grow, ready-made, on trees. Do you have more winged ideals?
According to the generation is the music thereof.
We become more united in exile than in Palestine.