Titled “Reformed Noses,” this is an amusing feuilleton from the “Meshugener filozof” (crazy philopsopher) column in “Der Arbayter Fraynd,” a Yiddish newspaper that was published in London between 1885 and 1915. The text opens with the narrator’s grandson coming home with the news that an American reformer has found away to surgically change the shape of people’s noses. This leads to humorous and satirical examples: the famous historical noses of Cleopatra and Napoleon; Eastern European politicians wanting to lead people by the nose; aristocratic British Jews who want to pass in English society by looking less Jewish, and who should and shouldn’t have been Jewish according to their nose. It ends with a little verse advertising nose reformation. Winchevsky’s humour is funny, topical, sometimes very silly, but always entertaining. It names real people as well as un-named individuals, and cleverly uses ‘nosey’ expressions and jokes.

Reformed Noses

רעפארמירטע נעזער

Reformirte nezer

October 31, 1890

Feuilleton

Vivi Lachs

Vivi Lachs

no known copyright

humor, satire, antisemitism, assimilation