“You’re a Liar!” Early in 1985 I was invited to speak at the Yablon Center, a formerly communist (they now called themselves linke, leftist) Jewish culture club that met in a modest storefront directly across the street from the gleaming-white colossus of NBC’s “Television City” in Los Angeles. Seventy-five people were waiting for me, seated on folding metal chairs. There was only one other young person in the room: a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who was writing a story about the Yiddish Book Center and the “Yiddish revival.” I began my talk with a quick overview in which I mentioned, more or less in passing, that Yiddish had not died a natural death, that one out of every two Yiddish-speaking Jews was murdered in the Holocaust, and that increasing persecution in the Soviet Union had culminated on August 12, 1952, when Stalin ordered all of his country’s leading Yiddish writers shot on a single night. No sooner was this last statement out of my mouth than an old man in the back of the room jumped to his feet, waved his fist in the air, and shouted at me in a heavy Yiddish accent, “You’re a liar!”
