“A Bintel Brief” (Yiddish for “A Bundle of Letters”) was the popular advice column that began running, in 1906, in Der Forverts (The Yiddish Daily Forward). In A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York (Ecco), author Liana Finck’s protagonist receives a package in the mail from her grandmother, a notebook pasted full of old newspaper clippings. When she opens it, Forward editor Abraham Cahan magically climbs out of the volume. Cahan conceived the column as a way of educating newly arrived Jewish immigrants (“greenhorns”) to the ways of the New World. Finck’s selection of questions here ranges from the weird (the barber dismayed by his dream of cutting a customer’s throat) to touching queries from the heartbroken. There’s even a recipe for schav (sorrel soup), like Cahan’s wife, Anna, made. — Mordecai Specktor
(American Jewish World, 4.25.14)
