[Mendele] Leonard Prager z"l

[Victor Bers]

Leonard Prager, editor of The Mendele Review, died on December 11.
According to his son, he  was working until the very end and suffered no
pain.

Though Lennie and I grew up a few blocks from one another in
Philadelphia -- where his sister Bertie and I were classmates for 9
years -- I never knew him until Mendele began to appear.  Only then did
it turn out that we had over the years occupied a number of intersecting
worlds, and were thus old friends from the very start.

Lennie was an original.  Though a Zionist, he rejected the denigration
of Yiddish that was at one time virtually part of the party line.  It
certainly did not help his career at Haifa University.  But what
concerned him most was that Yiddish literature and its history was
slipping into oblivion, that even those professing a love of the
language rarely read it or at best limited themselves to sophisticated
readings of a half dozen writers.  The Mendele Review, which he edited
and almost single-handedly wrote every month from 1997, is a lasting
testament to his passion.

And he accomplished all this despite being seriously ill for years.  We
have lost a treasured friend.


Noyekh Miller