What’s inside the Yiddish books we rescue? Why is this literature essential? The New Yiddish Library is answering these questions. Selected by leading scholars and published by Yale University Press, the series features both classic and undiscovered titles, with an emphasis on previously untranslated material.

Sholem Aleichem, The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl the Cantor’s Son. Two classic comic novels by the most popular Yiddish writer in history, newly translated by Hillel Halkin.

The I. L. Peretz Reader, edited by Ruth R. Wisse. A new edition of this profound and influential writer’s work, which includes for the first time the expressionistic play A Night in the Old Marketplace.

Itzik Manger, The World According to Itzik, translated and edited by Leonard Wolf. Manger specialized in brilliant mischief – Bible stories rewritten with a heymish anachronism and glimpses of the politics of Paradise. This volume collects his best work.

S. Ansky, The Dybbuk and Other Writings, edited by David G. Roskies. Best known for his remarkable play The Dybbuk, Ansky was also an ethnographer and a keen observer of the Jewish world. This volume includes The Dybbuk, a number of short stories and sketches, and selections from Ansky’s First World War journal The Destruction of Galicia. To order this book...

Lamed Shapiro, “The Cross” and Other Jewish Stories, edited by Leah Garrett. Shapiro’s spare modernist fiction includes explosive stories of the Eastern European pogroms and critical portraits of life in America.

Yehoshue Perle, Everyday Jews : Scenes From a Vanished Life, translated by Maier Deshell. A coming-of-age story narrated in the first person by Mendl, a twelve year old boy.

David Bergelson, The End of Everything, translated by Joseph Sherman. The most radically modernist Yiddish novel, which traces the ambivalence and despair of a refined and sensitive young woman trapped in a disintegrating social order.

Coming soon:

• Moshe Kulbak, Zelmenyaner, translated by Hillel Halkin. A mordant satire of Jewish life during the transition from the old Russian order to the new Soviet system.
• Listen and Believe: The Ghetto Reporting of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz, translated and edited by David Suchoff. Two brilliant journalists, Opoczynski in Warsaw and Zelkowicz in Lodz, chronicled the response of Jewish leaders and their people to the extraordinary circumstances of ghettoization under the Nazis. This volume collects a range of their work.
  
• Jacob Glatstein, Summoned Home, translated by Maier Deshell and edited by Ruth R. Wisse. Glatstein is known as one of the strongest poets in the Yiddish canon, but his two autobiographical novels are less well known. Intelligent, nuanced and perceptive, the books recount Glatstein’s 1934 visit to his mother in Lublin after 20 years in America.
  

The New Yiddish Library is a joint project of the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature and the National Yiddish Book Center. Additional support comes from the Kaplen Foundation and the Felix Posen Fund for the Translation of Modern Yiddish Literature.