Bøker i Judaic Traditions in LIterature, Music, and Art-serien

"The Dybbuk" is arguably the most famous play in the Yiddish repertoire and plays an intrinsic part in the cultural system that created the Yiddish imagination. Along with this new translation, this text offers a variety of literary works spanning the 17th to the 20th centuries.

Michael Levi Rodkinson is today frequently referred to as a minor Hasidic author and publisher, a characterization based on the criticism of his opponents rather than on his writings. In Literary Hasidism, Meir draws on those writings and their reception to present a completely different picture of this colourful and influential writer.

When young Zalmen Itzkowitz steps off the train on a dark, dreary day at the close of the nineteenth century, the residents of Miloslavka have no idea what's in store for them. Zalmen is a freethinker who has come to the rural town to earn his living as a tutor. Yet, rather than teach Hebrew, he plans to teach his students the Russian language and other secular subjects.

From 1923, when he emigrated from Bucharest, to his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Benjamin Fondane made a unique and independent-minded contribution to the literary and intellectual life of Paris. One of the most significant pieces in Fondane s body of work is the long poem Ulysses, first published in 1933.

Moishe Rozenbaumas (1922-2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and Central Asia and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet Russia to build a new life in Paris.

The poems collected in this bilingual volume represent the full range of Else Lasker-Schuler's work, from her earliest poems until her death. Haxton's translation embraces the poems' lyrical imagery, remaining faithful to the poet's vision while also capturing the cadence and rhythms of the poetry.

Abraham Karpinowitz (1913-2004) was born in Vilna, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania), the city that serves as both the backdrop and the central character for his stories. In this collection, Karpinowitz portrays, with compassion and intimacy, the dreams and struggles of the poor and disenfranchised Jews of his native city before the Holocaust.

Two early works by S.Y. Abramovitsh, . Sholem Aleichem s Tevye reemerges from new translations of "Hodel" and "Chava". The selections from Peretz include his finest stories about the hasidim, Following the translations are three biographical essays about these giants of modern Yiddish literature.

In his short life (1865-1921), Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky was a versatile and influential man of letters: an innovative Hebrew prose stylist; a collector of Jewish folklore; a scholar of ancient Jewish and Christian history. He was at once a peer of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Brothers Grimm, and a diverse circle of Jewish writers in the Russian Empire and German-speaking countries. As a Yiddish writer, however, he remains unknown to gen-eral readers. Written in 1902-1906, but not published in full until the 1920s, his stories were dismissed by prominent critics and viewed as out of step with the literary taste of his own time. Yet these vivid portraits of a small Jewish town (shtetl) in the southern Russian Empire can speak powerfully to new audiences today.With enchanting humor, social satire, and verbal dexterity, From a Distant Relation captures the world of the shtetl in a sharp realist prose style. Themes of repressed desire, poverty, relations with non-Jews, and historic upheavals echo in a cast of memorable characters. Many of the stories and monologues feature strong female protago-nists, while others shed light on misogyny in the culture of the shtetl. At the border between fiction and reportage, with a gritty underbelly and a deceptive naivete, Berdichevsky's stories explore dynamics of wealth, power, and gender in an intimate setting that resonates profoundly with contemporary Jewish life.

A tragic-comic novel in its essence, Petty Business chronicles a year in one family's life, set against the backdrop of Tel Aviv's rapidly changing global economy in the early 1990s. Pinkus's biting critique of Tel Aviv's provincial character and its residents' shtetl mentality is delivered with a perfect combination of wit, humour, and tender pathos.

First published in 1936, The People of Godlbozhits depicts the ordinary yet deeply complex life of a Jewish community, following the fortunes of one family and its many descendants. Set in a shtetl in Poland between the world wars, Rashkin's satiric novel offers a vivid cross-section not only of the residents' triumphs and struggles but also of their dense and complicated web of humanity.

New to Jerusalem and to adulthood, Rutha serves Cafe Shira's devoted customers with a quiet compassion and a sensitive gaze, collecting their stories and absorbing them at her peril. Avigdor, the melancholy and somewhat weary cafe owner, philosophizes about love as he attends to the needs of his patrons while ignoring his own. Christian, a young religious pilgrim, has come to Jerusalem to find God but stumbles upon a much different revelation. These characters form the heart of this wry, often poignant novel narrated through a series of vignettes. They are joined by a colorful cast of characters who frequent the literary cafe-long-married couples, young lovers, an eccentric poet, and a traumatized veteran-all finding refuge and occasionally wisdom among their motley urban community.Closely based on Ehrlich's own experiences over the twenty-five years he devoted to running a cafe that became an important Jerusalem cultural venue and landmark, Cafe Shira is a work of disarming tenderness and bittersweet love.