“Poetry”
Review
Review of Sutzkever’s Cycle Elephants by Night: African Poems, translated by Mel Konner
Eva Hückmann
Mel Konner’s compelling translation of Helfandn bay Nakht (1950) takes the reader through Sutzkever’s Nesiye iber Afrika, evoking stories of wise African kings, masked hunters, shape-shifting prey, lovers divided by crocodile rivers, and the creation of man beginning with elephant tusks.
Mar 03, 2025
Blog
Review of Burning Off The Page: The Life and Art of Celia Dropkin, an Erotic Yiddish Poet, directed by Eli Gorn
Jeremiah Lockwood
Jan 10, 2025
Texts & Translation
קערנדלעך װײץ
Grains of Wheat
Abraham Sutzkever
Translation by James Adam Redfield
A new, dynamic translation of Abraham Sutzkever's poem about the burial and regeneration of "the Jewish word."
Jan 06, 2025
Blog
A.N. Stencl (1897–1983)
Rachel Lichtenstein
My search for Stencl over the years has taken me across the globe.
Nov 10, 2024
Blog
Etlekhe verter vegn Irena Klepfisz and her poetry: A few words about Irena Klepfisz’s recent publications
Ulla Urszula Chowaniec
Her Birth and Later Years and Pomiędzy światami/ Between Worlds are more than poems and essays; these books are a testament to Irena Klepfisz’s life as a survivor, a Jewish lesbian, a Yiddishist, and a political activist.
Oct 21, 2024
Review
Review of So Many Warm Words by Rosa Nevadovska, trans. by Merle L. Bachman
Pearl Abraham
Merle L. Bachman’s new translation of a selection of Nevadovska’s poems, mostly from Lider Mayne, published by Ben Yehuda Press, is an event to celebrate.
Oct 09, 2024
Texts & Translation
די זילבערנע לײַכטערס
The Silver Candlesticks
Tea Arciszewska
Translation by Sonia Gollance
Sonia Gollance translates Arciszewska's poem about Yom Kippur candles and postwar memory.
Oct 08, 2024
Texts & Translation
ס’געוויין פֿון הונגעריקע קינדער
The Cry of Hungry Children
Yoysef Papyernikov
Translation by Tal Hever-Chybowski
Tal Hever-Chybowski translates Yoysef Papyernikov's "The Cry of Hungry Children" for In geveb's ongoing series on Yiddish literary responses to the war.
Jun 10, 2024
Review
Review of Montage: Works by Debora Vogel, trans. Lyubas
Golda van der Meer
This small hardcover book is a perfect gem for those who want to introduce themselves to Vogel’s poetry.
Apr 17, 2024
Blog
Loyt di Leyeners: Responses to “New Yiddish Poetry from the Israel-Gaza War”
The Editors, Tal Hever-Chybowski, Jessica Kirzane, Jordan Kutzik, Lawrence Rosenwald and Eva Mroczek
We are pleased to share these responses in order to broaden conversation about poetry in the midst of disaster.
Apr 02, 2024
Texts & Translation
צו מײַן ברודער אַבֿרהם רײזען
To My Brother Avrom Reisen
Sarah Reisen
Translation by Faith Jones, Anita Norich and David Mazower
A translation of Sarah Reisen's poem to her brother, Avrom.
Dec 07, 2023
Texts & Translation
אַ קוש
A Kiss
Celia Dropkin
Translation by Faith Jones, Anita Norich and David Mazower
A translation of Celia Dropkin's "A kush."
Nov 19, 2023
Texts & Translation
וְהָיָה הָעולָם
New Creation
Ber Kotlerman
Translation by Jessica Kirzane
A new Yiddish poem by Ber Kotlerman, composed on Motsei Simchat Torah 5784, and translated by Jessica Kirzane.
Oct 17, 2023
Texts & Translation
יום־כּיפּור אין שול
Yom Kippur in Synagogue
Avrom Liessin
Translation by Dov Greenwood
Dov Greenwood translates Avrom Liessin's haunting poem about faith and fear on Yom Kippur.
Sep 20, 2023
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.
Jul 05, 2023
Blog
Yiddish Studies - Present and Future: A Conference Marking the 15th Yortsayt of Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter (z’’l)
Zackary Sholem Berger
Yiddish Studies - Present and Future: A conference marking the 15th yortsayt of Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter (z’’l) included discussion and debate.
Mar 03, 2023
Texts & Translation
פּאַריז
Paris
Abraham Sutzkever
Translation by Annabel Cohen
Annabel Cohen translates Abraham Sutzkever's poem, "Paris."
Dec 06, 2022
Article
The Yiddish Columbus: Critical Counter-History and the Remapping of American Jewish Literature
Rachel Rubinstein
Glantz’s masterwork Kristobal Kolon offers a transnational vision of the Americas that insists—in Yiddish—on its Jewish, Muslim, indigenous and African origins, suggesting a new geography for American Jewish literature that exceeds the boundaries of what we understand the Americas and Jewishness to be, and challenging our expectations of what Yiddish literature can contain.
Nov 09, 2022
Interview
"I salvage the shards": an interview with Polish poet Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
Jessica Kirzane and Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
An interview with Polish poet and musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski.
Nov 02, 2022
Article
‘Brother Jews of the Entire World!’ Bergelson, Hofshteyn, and Soviet-Yiddish in the Worldwide Jewish Family
Brett Winestock
This article looks at the wartime artistic and journalistic output of Dovid Bergelson and Dovid Hofshteyn to see how these writers appropriated Soviet terminology to paint Soviet Jews as the elder brothers in a worldwide Jewish family.
Nov 01, 2022
Blog
Kosmopolitn: a Time Capsule to a World that Maybe Was
Zeke Levine
Kosmopolitn, the latest Tsvey Brider release from Borscht Beat Records, is a tribute to the social and cultural dynamism of turn-of-the-twentieth century Yiddish poetic life.
Oct 20, 2022
Review
Review of Hazel Frankel's Holocaust and Home: The Poetry of David Fram from Lithuania to South Africa
Anne Landsman
Apr 07, 2022
Texts & Translation
Selected Poems by Osher Shvartsman
Osher Shvartsman
Translation by Joshua Price
A selection of Osher Shvartsman's poems translated into English by Josh Price.
Mar 23, 2022
Texts & Translation
Selections from Yidishe dikhterins
Dina Libkes and Hinde Roytblat
Translation by Reyzl Grace MoChridhe
Reyzl Grace MoChridhe translates three poems by Hinde Roytblat and Dina Libkes, two Yiddish authors with Kyiv connections, selected from Ezra Korman's Yidishe dikhterins anthology (1928).
Mar 09, 2022
Texts & Translation
ספּינאָזאַ
Spinoza
Melekh Ravitsh
Translation by Lazer Lederhendler
An excerpt from Melekh Ravitsh's memoirs on the Yiddish writer's encounter with Spinoza's Ethics.
Feb 17, 2022
Review
Review of Childe Harold of Dysna by Moyshe Kulbak, translated by Robert Adler Peckerar
Harriet Murav
Moyshe Kulbak’s Childe Harold of Dysna—a novel in verse that is inspired by Lord Byron and dramatizes the character of the Jewish flaneur—charms, delights, and brings a gentle sorrow.
Oct 31, 2021
Article
Walking with Vogel: New Perspectives on Debora Vogel
Anna Elena Torres, Kathryn Hellerstein and Anastasiya Lyubas
This special issue invites you to walk with Debora Vogel as she maps the spaces of Jewish life through avant-garde forms. We bring together new perspectives on Vogel through poetry, visual art, translation, and scholarship, all in an attempt to follow the many lines of creative and critical inquiry that emerge from Vogel’s work.
Click here for a pdf of this article.
Oct 26, 2021
Texts & Translation
Erasing the Written, Rewriting the Erased: A Fragmented and Imperfect Tribute to Vogel
Zackary Sholem Berger
Zackary Sholem Berger renders two poems by Vogel anew via the poetic method of translation-erasure, revealing through distortion the contours that lead from language to language across the decades.
Oct 26, 2021
Blog
Herring Barrels
Maia Grace
During the dog days of summer, lines of Vogel’s poetry hummed in my head, and I felt compelled to write back. When I started writing the poems below, Vogel became real to me as a character. The poems are written to her. They address her and beg a response.
Oct 26, 2021
Blog
Montage-Murals: Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson’s “Present Figures” (Berlin 2021)
Anna Elena Torres
This spring, Debora Vogel’s poetry bloomed riotously across the faces of three buildings in Berlin. Passages from the collection Day Figures (Tog-Figurn, 1930) appeared in Vogel’s Yiddish and in translations into German, Arabic, and English, the letters of those four alphabets painted alongside hobo hieroglyphs, squatter runes, and paleotype. This series of calligraphic murals is the work of Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson (b. 1984).
Oct 26, 2021
Special Issue
Walking with Vogel
New perspectives on Debora Vogel through poetry, visual art, translation, and scholarship
This special issue invites you to walk with Debora Vogel as she maps the spaces of Jewish life through avant-garde forms. We bring together new perspectives on Vogel through poetry, visual art, translation, and scholarship, all in an attempt to follow the many lines of creative and critical inquiry that emerge from Vogel’s work.
Oct 2021
Review
Review of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine by Amelia M. Glaser
Emily Robins Sharpe
Oct 21, 2021
Texts & Translation
Selections from Neger-Dikhtung in Amerike (Negro-Poetry in America)
Anita Scott Coleman , Angelina Weld Grimke and Clarissa Scott Delaney
Translation by Robert Magidoff
Edited by Eli Rosenblatt
Eli Rosenblatt introduces three poems by African American women poets of the Harlem Renaissance, translated into Yiddish by Robert Magidoff for the 1936 anthology Neger-Dikhtung in America (Negro-Poetry in America), published in Moscow.
Jun 25, 2021
Texts & Translation
אַלף, בית,...
Alef, Beys . . .
Freed Weininger
Translation by Jonah Lubin
An alefbetical voyage into the cosmos, in Jonah Lubin's alliterative translation
Apr 12, 2021
Pedagogy
The Yudika Variations: Translating b'Chevrusa
Faith Jones and Annie Sommer Kaufman
The authors describe an exercise in which they translate and re-translate the same text into different formats.
Mar 30, 2021
Article
The Image of Streetwalkers in Itzik Manger’s and Debora Vogel’s Ballads
Ekaterina Kuznetsova and Anastasiya Lyubas
By considering the image of the streetwalker in Manger’s and Vogel’s work, this article deepens the understanding of Yiddish creativity as ultimately multimodal and interconnected.
Dec 02, 2020
Texts & Translation
War Poems
Yoysef Kerler
Translation by Maia Evrona
Two poems by Yoysef Kerler
Nov 01, 2020
Texts & Translation
אורי צבֿי פֿאַרן צלם
Uri Zvi Before the Cross
Uri Zvi Grinberg
Translation by James Adam Redfield
A new translation of Uri Zvi Grinberg's provocative experimental typographic poem, first published in his literary journal Albatros.
Jul 12, 2020
Article
Letters Without Addresses: Abraham Sutzkever’s Late Style
Saul Noam Zaritt
Abraham Sutzkever's poetry is often read within the confines of "Holocaust literature". This essays reads a selection of Sutzkever’s poetry against the Holocaust, against the apocalypse, and against the horizons of meaning that the label of "Holocaust literature" might impose.
Jun 30, 2020
Article
Raysn: The Belarusian Frontier of Yiddish Modernism
Mikhail Krutikov
On the eve of World War I, poets Leyb Naydus, Moyshe Kulbak, and Elkhonen Vogler developed a sensitivity to nature in an attempt to reclaim the imaginary Jewish territories of Lite and Raysn.
Jun 23, 2020
Texts & Translation
צוויי לידער
Two Poems
Miryam Ulinover
Translation by Mindy Liberman
Two poems by Miryam Ulinover, translated by Mindy Liberman.
Jun 01, 2020
Texts & Translation
דרײַ לידער
Three Poems
Sarah Reisen
Translation by Eli Jany
Three poems by Sarah Reisen.
May 12, 2020
Texts & Translation
דרײַ לידער
Three Poems
Leyb Kvitko
Translation by Harriet Murav and Zackary Sholem Berger
Three poems by Leyb Kvitko from his 1919 collection, Trit.
Mar 05, 2020
Blog
The 2087th Question or When Silence Is the Only Answer
Irena Klepfisz
What kind of life will there be after the Resurrection of the Dead?
I may not believe in an afterlife or in resurrections, but I do believe that cultures can be reawakened and revived in new generations.
Jan 07, 2020
Article
“Literarishe reveransn”: Yiddish Translation as Negotiation
Augusta Costiuc Radosav
Radosav discusses her experiences as a translator of Yiddish poetry into Romanian and her evaluation of certain translations from other languages into Romanian or from Romanian into Yiddish. The essay outlines a strategy of “translation-recreation,” in which the translator balances a sense of fidelity to the source text with the attempt to creatively reproduce its internal mechanism.
Dec 16, 2019
Pedagogy
On Literary Translation
Adriana X. Jacobs
Adriana X. Jacobs on her commitment to literary translation.
Nov 12, 2019
Texts & Translation
די באַלאַדע פֿון מײַן אומעט
My Tale of Woe
Moyshe-Leyb Halpern
Translation by Michael Shapiro
Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's morbid, postmodernist ballad in a new, creative translation by Michael Shapiro.
Nov 08, 2019
Blog
Northern Voices: New Yiddish Song in Sweden
Jewlia Eisenberg
Eisenberg reviews Shtoltse Lider, a multimedia stage show, with songs in Yiddish and English, and explanations and evocations in Swedish, from Swedish duo Ida and Louise.
Jun 25, 2019
Review
Review of Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women's Poetry by Zohar Weiman-Kelman
Shoshana Olidort
Jun 13, 2019
Pedagogy
Teaching Guide to Jacob Glatstein’s Anti-Fascist Poem “Goblin Nogood Has Run Out of Clout” (trans. Shandler)
Mark I. West
Mark I. West offers suggestions for teaching Jacob Glatstein's 1943 Anti-Fascist children's poem.
Jun 10, 2019
Blog
“Circular Landscapes: A Symposium on Debora Vogel": A Student's Perspective
Jonah Lubin
May 27, 2019
Blog
Sweeping, Bewitching, Divinely Dissonant: A Review of Alex Weiser's Album and all the days were purple
Miranda Cooper
May 22, 2019
Texts & Translation
אַ שטיקעלע ברויט
A Crumb of Bread
David Edelstadt
Translation by Zachary Groz
A new translation of David Edelshtat's proletarian poem a shtikele broyt.
Apr 30, 2019
Blog
“They were unique. They knew it.”: An Interview with Paul Buhle on Field Work, Poetry and the History of the American Left
Dade Lemanski
Apr 13, 2019
Pedagogy
Teaching Guide to Erotic Yiddish Poetry
Jessica Kirzane
This teaching guide offers suggestions and reflections from several scholars about teaching erotic Yiddish poetry.
Apr 09, 2019
Blog
An Idiosyncratic Round-Up of Yiddish Poetry in 2018
Zackary Sholem Berger
A list of all Yiddish books of poetry published in 2018, sorted alphabetically by the author’s last name, together with my individual idiosyncratic impressions about what this book tells us about Yiddish poetry today.
Jan 31, 2019
Article
The Shtik Kabole Niger Couldn’t Digest: Poetry, Messianism, and Literatoyre in Aaron Zeitlin’s Keter
Nathan Wolski
This study presents a translation and analysis of Aaron Zeitlin’s (1898-1973) poem “Keter: Fragmenten fun a rapsodye,” published in 1923, at the height of the Warsaw expressionist explosion of the early twenties.
Nov 29, 2018
Texts & Translation
כּתר: פֿראַגמענטן פֿון אַ ראַפּסאָדיע
Keter: Fragments of a Rhapsody
Aaron Zeitlin
Translation by Nathan Wolski
Zeitlin’s kabbalistic poem offers a stunning, yet difficult, fusion of Yiddish expressionism and futurism on the one hand, and mystical and messianic thought on the other.
Nov 29, 2018
Texts & Translation
צוויי לידער
Two Poems
Celia Dropkin
Translation by Shoshana Olidort
Two poems by Celia Dropkin
Oct 10, 2018
Blog
Speaking of Sutzkever: On Yiddish in Scandinavia
Jan Schwarz
New research and translation of Avrom Sutzkever's work leads to a multilingual, multinational convening of Yiddishists in Copenhagen, Denmark and in Lund, Sweden.
Jun 28, 2018
Blog
Playlisticle: Yiddish Orality in an Age of Digital Reproduction
David G. Roskies
A playlisticle of Yiddish speech acts available in digital formats.
Jun 25, 2018
Texts & Translation
באַלײדיקט
Wounded
Malka Lee
Translation by Maia Evrona
A new translation of Malka Lee's "Baleydikt" from her 1932 collection Lider.
May 01, 2018
Blog
Yiddish Moves
Richard J. Fein
Not a translation! An original English-language Yiddish poem.
Apr 18, 2018
Pedagogy
Teaching Guide for Leyzer Volf's Evigingo (trans. Finkin)
Jordan Finkin
Jordan Finkin offers resources and ideas for teaching this unusual poem.
Mar 12, 2018
Review
Die Geometrie des Verzichts: Deborah Vogel's poetry, essays, and letters in a new German translation and compilation
Anastasiya Lyubas
This volume, edited and translated by Anna Maja Misiak, is the first edition of Debora Vogel’s work in any language to include all of her prose and poetry.
Mar 06, 2018
Texts & Translation
נישגוט־לאַפּיטוט האָט פֿאַרלױרן דעם מוט
Goblin Nogood Has Run Out of Clout
Jacob Glatstein
Translation by Jeffrey Shandler
A new translation of Jacob Glatstein's powerful and playful 1943 children's poem.
Nov 09, 2017
Texts & Translation
רויך
Smoke
Jacob Glatstein
Translation by Hershl Hartman
A standalone poem by Jacob Glatstein
Nov 09, 2017
Texts & Translation
צװיי לידער
Two Poems
Itzik Manger
Translation by Murray Citron
"I'll Take Off My Shoes" and "Abraham Our Father Takes Isaac to the Sacrifice" by Itzik Manger.
Oct 02, 2017
Review
Claudia Rosenzweig's Bovo d’Antona by Elye Bokher. A Yiddish Romance: A Critical Edition with Commentary
Oren Cohen Roman
A review of Claudia Rosenzweig's new critical edition of the bove-bukh.
May 25, 2017
Article
A Poetic Paradox: Gender and Self in Anna Margolin’s Mary Cycle
Melissa Weininger
Weininger analyzes Anna Margolin's cycle of poems entitled "Mary," exploring her use of Christological themes and figures and the expression of identity and self-definition in the poems.
May 18, 2017
Pedagogy
Teaching Guide for Yoysef Kerler’s “Old Fashioned” and “The Sea” (trans. Evrona)
Jessica Kirzane
The second in a series of teaching guides, this one for Maia Evrona's translation of Yoysef Kerler's poems "Old Fashioned" and "The Sea" (1979).
Jan 17, 2017
Texts & Translation
מײַן פֿאָטער
My Father
Aaron Zeitlin
Translation by Nathan Wolski
Aaron Zeitlin's poem about his father, Hillel Zeitlin
Jan 11, 2017
Texts & Translation
לידער פֿון טאָגבוך
Three poems from Poems from my Diary
Abraham Sutzkever
Translation by Maia Evrona
Three poems from Abraham Sutzkever’s collection Poems from My Diary.
Dec 05, 2016
Texts & Translation
"איר שמייכל", "אַ מענטש"
"Her Smile" and "A Man"
Anna Margolin
Translation by Joseph Kary
New translations of two poems from Anna Margolin's lider.
Nov 08, 2016
Texts & Translation
Evigingo
Leyzer Volf
Translation by Jordan Finkin
Leyzer Volf's "Yiddish Hiawatha", written over three days and published in a romanized script.
Oct 12, 2016
Texts & Translation
סאַקאָ און וואַנזעטיס מאָנטיק
Sacco and Vanzetti’s Monday
Jacob Glatstein
Translation by Lawrence Rosenwald
A poem about Sacco and Vanzetti, originally published the day before their execution.
May 24, 2016
Texts & Translation
דער פֿערציקיעריקער מאַן
The Forty-Year-Old Man
Peretz Markish
Translation by Rose Waldman
New translations of four sections from Markish's book-length modernist poem.
May 18, 2016
Texts & Translation
קיביאַ
Qibya
Jacob Glatstein
Translation by Adi Mahalel
A new translation of Jacob Glatstein's 1956 poem about the "Qibya affair."
Feb 21, 2016
Texts & Translation
“אַלטמאָדיש“ און „דער ים„
"Old-Fashioned" and "The Sea"
Yoysef Kerler
Translation by Maia Evrona
Translations of two poems by Yoysef Kerler
Feb 15, 2016
Texts & Translation
אָאַזיס
Poems from Oasis
Abraham Sutzkever
Translation by James Nadel
New translations of six poems from Sutzkever's 1960 collection Oasis.
Dec 20, 2015
Blog
The Virtuoso of Loneliness: A Brief Invitation to Leyeles
Zackary Sholem Berger
Hear the voice of Yiddish poet Aaron Glantz-Leyeles as he meditates on the loneliness of the Yiddish writer while still embracing the magic of the American landscape.
Oct 06, 2015
Article
The Price of Remorse: Yiddish and the Work of Mourning in Jacob Steinberg’s Hebrew Poetry
Elazar Elhanan
Jacob Steinberg's poetry between Hebrew and Yiddish, between mourning and melancholy.
Sep 24, 2015
Texts & Translation
סיביר
Siberia
Abraham Sutzkever
Translation by Richard J. Fein
Sutzkever's cycle of poems about his childhood years spent in Siberia: "In the light-dark snowed-under / village of my childhood in Siberia / blossoms bloom from shadows’ eyes— / countless quicksilver blossoms..."
Sep 08, 2015
Blog
How to Build Bridges to People? Benjamin Harshav and Yiddish
Shachar Pinsker
An essay on the late Benjamin Harshav, one of the most important literary scholars of the last decades, and how in his work Yiddish served as a bridge between Europe, Israel, and North America, between poetry, translation, and scholarship.
Aug 26, 2015
Texts & Translation
אַ לוויה אין רעגן
A Funeral in the Rain
Abraham Sutzkever
Translation by Zackary Sholem Berger
A prose poem from Abraham Sutzkever's 1975 volume Green Aquarium. "A man with a heavy bag on his back approaches a dark city in a rainstorm..."
Aug 12, 2015
Article
Dream of a Common loshn
Zohar Weiman-Kelman
How can we read Yiddish poetry across time to find a new common language? How can we create a space for the imagined dialogues of Kadia Molodowsky and Adrienne Rich with their foremothers, an alternative narrative of blood and text?
Aug 11, 2015