Bøger i Judaic Traditions in Literatur serien

A House with Seven Windows by Kadya Molodowsky is the famed Yiddish poet's only collection of short stories. Written in simple prose, these stories are subtle portraits--tragic-comic, bittersweet, always generous spirited--or ordinary people: Jews in pre-World War II Eastern Europe and Jews struggling to adjust to life in America. A traditional-minded husband is defeated by his wife who wants only the latest fashion. A community leader's position is supported and maintained by his more energetic and political-minded wife. A couple, ardent supporters of the newly formed state of Israel, nevertheless find themselves at odds with their son who intends to lie there. An American Jew who almost single-handedly supports his shtetl in Europe returns to find that it has been obliterated by the Nazis. A couple, newly arrived from the DP camps in Europe, struggles to set sail on the wide seas of America and succeeds, but at a price. While many of the stories are set in Europe and are, in fact, memoirs of Jewish shtetl life, others depict the classic dilemmas of immigrants wrestling with their own identity--stories about adapting to a new culture yet attempting to maintain traditional customs, stories about the inability of one generation to understand the other. Molodowsky's lucid style and keen observation of the absurd and the sublime offer readers beautifully crafted stories filled with richly drawn character portraits.

When the young narrator of Miriam Karpilove's A Provincial Newspaper leaves New York to work for a new Yiddish newspaper in Massachusetts, she expects to be treated with respect as a professional writer. Instead, she finds herself underpaid and overworked. In this slapstick novella, Karpilove's narrator lampoons the gaggle of blundering publishers and editors who put her through the ringer and spit her back out again.Along with A Provincial Newspaper, this captivating collection includes nineteen stories originally published in Forverts in the 1930s, during Karpilove's time as a staff writer at that newspaper. In the stories, we find a large cast of characters-an older woman navigating widowhood, a writer rebuffed by dismissive audiences, American-born Jewish girls unable to communicate with Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and a painter so overcome with jealousy about his muse's potential lover that he misses his opportunity with her-each portrayed with both sympathy and irony, in ways unexpected and delightful. Also included are Karpilove's recollections of her arrival in Palestine in 1926, chronicled with the same buoyant cynicism and witty repartee that is beloved by readers of her fiction.

"According to the writer, the major purpose of this particular novel was to ponder the philosophical questions of freedom and slavery and faith and godlessness. The novel shows the historical reality of a routine Jewish life and reflects on the fate of the Jewish people and humanity in general"--

With his intense, quickfire psychological fiction and consistent portrayal of characters' subconscious minds, Jonah Rosenfeld is a standout among Yiddish authors of the early twentieth century. In his dedication to observing human psychology, he frequently confronted issues rarely dealt with by his contemporaries.In A Plague of Cholera and Other Stories, Rosenfeld confronts the issues of his day, whether they be epidemics, differing social expectations for men and women, financial instability, or challenges to Jewish life at the beginning of the twentieth century. His themes are as relevant today as when the stories were first published. This new translation from the original Yiddish is culled from anthologies spanning Rosenfeld's career, starting in 1924 and running through 1959 and contextualized alongside Rosenfeld's biography and other writings. These short stories are presented in a fresh, approachable way, welcoming to students as well as seasoned readers of Yiddish texts and translations.By narrating the lives of impoverished and working-class Jews in Europe and urban North America, A Plague of Cholera and Other Stories shines a light on the secular, uniquely Yiddish challenges of its day while offering a comprehensive, informed perspective by one of the most prominent writers of the language.