The books you are about to discover represent the most concentrated outpouring of literary creativity in Jewish history.  They chronicle traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and they give voice to Jews’ contentious, impassioned, and as yet unfinished struggle to redefine their identity in a modern world.  Searing, comic and tragic, they are the direct antecedent of Jewish writing that followed in English, Hebrew, and other languages.

When the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, he assured his audience that “Yiddish has not yet spoken its last word.”  The books that await you here have never had more to say.

This exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from the David Berg Foundation.