“Fiction”

Review

Review of Lisa Richter’s Nautilus and Bone; An Auto/biography in Poems

Maia Evrona

As a reader of Margolin’s poetry in its original Yiddish, and a translator of her work into English, I approached this collection with both interest and skepticism.

Article

Holocaust Literature and Autorevision: Shaye Shpigl’s Ghetto Stories Written in, and Rewritten after, the Lodz Ghetto

Sven-Erik Rose

Shpigl’s Yiddish-Yiddish autorevisions powerfully exemplify an author’s felt compulsion to rewrite wartime writings from a postwar perspective even when no change of language—no literal translation—was involved.

Review

Review of From the Jewish Provinces by Fradl Shtok, translated by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter

Sonia Gollance

From the Jewish Provinces is a valuable and highly readable addition to Yiddish literature in translation.

Review

“Love is Death”: Judith: A Tale of Love and Woe

Sean Sidky

Judith is a novel about the mundanities of life and love that, as perhaps painful and unhealthy as they later turn out to be, persist even as the world around us erupts into violence, and that we carry with us halfway across the world and half a lifetime away.

Review

Sewn with the Tiniest of Pearls

Jessica Kirzane

Murphy’s translations of Perl’s stories allow us to appreciate an ever more colorful canvas of modern Yiddish literature.

Article

Breaking Ground, Broken English: Abraham Cahan’s The Imported Bridegroom

Hana Wirth-Nesher

Cahan's characters speak in broken languages, and in so doing find themselves unable to find stable ground in America.

Texts & Translation

אין דער צוקונפֿט־שטאָט עדעניאַ —3

In the Future City of Edenia (Part 3)

Kalman Zingman

Translation by Jordan Finkin

The third part of Zingman's Futuristic Utopian Novella 

Texts & Translation

אין דער צוקונפֿט־שטאָט עדעניאַ —2

In the Future City of Edenia (Part 2)

Kalman Zingman

Translation by Jordan Finkin

The second part of Zingman's Futuristic Utopian Novella 

Texts & Translation

אין דער צוקונפֿט־שטאָט עדעניאַ —1

In the Future City of Edenia (Part 1)

Kalman Zingman

Translation by Jordan Finkin

Zingman's Futuristic Utopian Novella 

Texts & Translation

חיים גראַװיצער (די געשיכטע פֿון דעם געפֿאַלענעם): פֿון דער חבדישער װעלט

Chaim Gravitzer (The Tale of the Downfallen One): From the World of Chabad

Fishl Schneersohn

Translation by Ri J. Turner

An extract from Fishl Schneersohn's novel Chaim Gravitzer: The Tale of the Downfallen One From the World of Chabad.

Review

Judgment

Boris Dralyuk

In time for the one hundredth anniversary of the October revolution, Dovid Bergelson's novel Mides-hadin is out in a new translation by Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich. 

Pedagogy

Teaching Guide for Blume Lempel's "The Debt" (trans Cassedy and Taub)

Jennifer Kronovet

The third in a series of teaching guides, this one for Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Taub's translation of Blume Lempel's story "The Debt."

Review

Nothing Backwards about the Forward's New Anthology

Eileen Pollack

The new anthology of stories published in The Forward has more than a few gems, Eileen Pollack reviews. 

Texts & Translation

דער חובֿ

The Debt

Blume Lempel

Translation by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

An exclusive extract from Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel. 

Blog

A Staring Contest in the Hall of Mirrors: Isaac Bashevis Singer

Eitan Kensky

In a pair of short stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer imagines two characters suffering from writer's block, and the opposing ways in which their problem manifests. 

Blog

A Clan on the Move: A Zelmenyaner Family Tree

Sasha Senderovich and David Coons

How to make sense of a family saga that charts the very creation of the Soviet Jew: begin by making a family tree.

Review

“To what might the yard have been compared?”

Madeleine Cohen

"Ach, the things a poor tailor has lived to see! We live in times when the coats go around making themselves." A review of a recent translation of Kulbak's Zelmenyaner.