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Yiddish Book Center

Regenerating Jewish Culture

Celebrating forty years of book rescue, digitization, translation,
educational programs, oral histories, exhibitions

פֿרישע נײַעס

Now

Listen

Rachelle Grossman on Yiddish Print Culture and Rare Yiddish Books

Read

Donor Profile: Bunny and Jack Hoffinger

Attend

Virtual Public Programs Calendar

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With your support, we can process thousands of priceless Yiddish books that have arrived since the pandemic began and share them online with waiting readers everywhere.

Watch

Newly Opened Exhibits by Multi-Media Artist, Steve Marcus: Through the Hat and Tales from the Golden Medina

Read

Learn More About In eynem, the Yiddish Book Center's Award-Winning New Yiddish Textbook

Read

"Walking in Karlsbad" By Abraham Cahan, Translated by Chana Pollack

Focus On High Holidays

September arrives and along with it the High Holidays. To mark the month, two stories in translation, an interview with Abigail Pogrebin, author of My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew, in which she talks about how her book exploration of these holidays helped her understand her Jewishness in a new way, and a compilation of oral history clips in which narrators from Warsaw to Detroit to Cape Town speak about their recollections of the holidays.

Read

Ne’ilah: Two High Holiday Stories by Rosa Palatnik in translation

Watch

Stories from Warsaw to Detroit to Cape Town

Listen

Exploring Jewish Holidays with Abigail Pogrebin

אויסגעקליבן

Handpicked Eitan Kensky

There are few people more uniquely qualified to delve into the Yiddish Book Center's collections than Eitan Kensky. When Eitan served as the Center's director of collections initiatives he was instrumental in discovering and curating an expansive range of materials—not just books, but also audio and video recordings, translations, and digital collections.  The following are a few of his favorite finds.

 

Ruth Wisse on "The Uncrowned Jewish Poet Laureate"

As far as I'm concerned, these lectures amount to the greatest work of scholarship of the greatest Yiddish poet. These were distributed on cassette to members not long after they were recorded in the mid-1990s. I listened to them on cassette in the Philips Reading Room of Widener Library around 2009 and felt as if I were being let in on secret knowledge.

"Tsipke" by Solomea Perl

This was one of the last translations that I edited when I worked at the Center. I worked very closely with the translator, Ruth Murphy. She had a voice and vision and I'm so glad there's now a book-length translation of Perl.

Der sotn in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer

I'm currently re-reading Bashevis Singer's novel, Shadows on the Hudson. It was written in 1957, but never collected in book form during Singer's lifetime. It was published posthumously in English translation by the late Joseph Sherman. It's arguably Singer's American masterpiece -- with Satan in Goray his European masterwork. And the latter one you can read in Yiddish!