In 1911, Michael Usiskin came to the Jewish settlement of Edenbridge in northeastern Saskatchewan. He and his fellow pioneers struggled with weather, mud, isolation, and the secular/religious tensions they had brought with them, while attempting to maintain a substantive Jewish cultural life in this remote place. Usiskin’s book Oksn un motorn (Oxen and Tractors, Toronto, 1945) tells the story.

On January 20, 2010, the Yiddish world lost a poet and hero. Born in 1913, Avrom Sutzkever spent his early childhood in Siberia and his youth in Vilna, where he belonged to the Yiddish writers' group Yung Vilne. During the Nazi occupation he used his forced labor detail to smuggle arms into the Vilna Ghetto and rare materials out of the YIVO archive, and documented the conditions of the ghetto in verse. After his escape to the partisans in 1943 he was airlifted to Moscow, and later testified at the Nuremberg trials. In 1947 he moved to Tel Aviv and founded the literary quarterly Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain, which he edited until 1995). His presence and his work brought new life to Yiddish in Israel, and he is the only Yiddish poet to have received the Israel Prize (1985). View Di festung and other books by Sutzkever in our digital library.

Sholem Aleichem’s little-known novel Blonzende shtern (Wandering Stars) gives a vivid and gritty portrait of the Yiddish theater in the late 19th and early 20th century. Reizel the poor cantor’s daughter and Leibl the rich man’s son fall in love, but are separated by their careers. Recently translated by Aliza Shevrin.

Zol ikh farglaykhn dikh tsum zumer-tog? Shall I compare thee to a Summer's Day? The works of Shakespeare fascinated many Yiddish translators. A number of his plays were published in Yiddish, including an alleged Polish edition of a Yiddish King Lear that included the claim fartaytsht un farbesert ("translated and improved") on the title page. You can view or download two translations from our Digital Yiddish Library:  a bilingual edition of the Sonnets, translated by Berl Lapin, who also translated William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost; and a translation by Abraham Asen, who also translated Whitman, Tennyson, Byron, and The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam.