Pakn Treger

• Underlined stories (below) are available online.
• To view other past issues, click on "Archives" here or at left.
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• You can also purchase back issues from our bookstore.

The 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature
The National Yiddish Book Center presents the long-awaited list of the books that best record Jewish experience and sensibility in our tumultuous age. Here’s a Jewish canon-in-the-making: fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir in nearly a dozen languages and spanning nearly 150 years. Published for the first time in Pakn Treger, the list includes description of each book and essays by the judges.

• The Making of a List
• The complete Annotated List

Essays by Our Judges

• The Ultimate Rabbi:Tevye the Dairyman - by Ilan Stavans
• The First Hebrew Novel: Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets - by Hillel Halkin
• The Poetry of Saul Tchernikhovsky - by Robert Alter
• Life No More Routine: S.Y. Agnon's A Guest for the Night - by Gershon Shaked
• Splinters of Eternity: The Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever - by Ruth Wisse
• Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City - by Kenneth Turan
• Behind High Walls: The Garden of the Finzi-Contini - by Glenda Abramson
• Maus Traps: Another look at Art Spiegelman's masterpiece - by Jeremy Dauber

Essay

Forward and Back
by Jonathan Rosen
The former editor of the Arts & Letters section of the English Forward encountered Howe, Bellow, Kazin, and others as he explored his-and our –relation to the ever-present Yiddish world. On the way, he discovered that we are all immigrants, even if we’re born here.

Departments

• From the Editor
• A Bintl Brief
• Calendar of Events
• Field Notes: The Language Unleashed by Catherine Madsen