Texts & Translations

If Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik had left his slippers in your house, would you give them back? Read how Sholem Aleichem handled this problem.

Oct 20, 2015

Best known for his call to found a university-level institution devoted to Ashkenazic culture, which helped to lead to the founding of YIVO, Nokhem Shtif develops his arguments for Yiddishism in these excerpts from his 1920 work, “Yiddish and the Jews.”

Oct 04, 2015

This chapter from Joseph Cohen’s memoir offers a rare glimpse into the American Jewish Anarchist circles of the early twentieth century.

Sep 29, 2015

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

Mides hadin (1929) is one of David Bergelson’s most innovative and experimental works. An aura of mystery infuses the opening chapter: three riders go out on an evening patrol that seems more like dream than reality.

Aug 14, 2015

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

In this 1910 essay, Chaim Zhitlowsky examines how the translation of works of world literature into Yiddish can be a way to establish Yiddish as a kultur-shprakh, a language as modern and expressive as European languages.

Aug 11, 2015

A Hasidic homily from the eighteenth century by R. Aaron of Karlin. The message is simple and speaks to the heart of Hasidic thought: sadness may have some limited utility, but depression is always a destructive force that inhibits spiritual growth.

Aug 10, 2015