White Goat Press

Among the tens of thousands of books published in Yiddish are treasures of literature, scholarship, and reportage that tell the complex story of Jewish life in the modern world. The mission of White Goat Press is to make these works accessible to English readers in translation.

White Goat Press publications: Seeds in the Desert and Warsaw Stories
White Goat Press publications: Seeds in the Desert and Warsaw Stories

White Goat Press Titles

Submissions

White Goat Press publishes Yiddish literature newly translated into English. We publish work by both well-known and previously neglected Yiddish writers, and we consider all genres.

White Goat Press accepts unsolicited manuscripts on a rolling basis. We review submissions twice per year: in the fall and in the spring. To be considered for the fall review, submissions must be received by October 1. To be considered for the spring review, submissions must be received by April 1. Manuscripts can be submitted through the manuscript submissions webform. For questions, contact Jeff Hayes, manager of publishing and book programs.

Each year the Yiddish Book Center awards a small number of grants to publishers bringing out new works of Yiddish literature in English translation. Find out more about our grants for publishers.

New Yiddish Library

Prior to the founding of White Goat Press, our New Yiddish Library series at Yale University Press published ten critically acclaimed translations of Yiddish works, including fiction, memoir, drama, and journalism.

Titles in the New Yiddish Library (available both in print and as e-books)

• In Those Nightmarish Days By Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz. Translated and edited by David Suchoff, with an introduction by Sam Kassow.
As journalists writing in the wartime Polish ghettos, Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz captured the anxiety and uncertainty of daily life for Jews with breathtaking immediacy.

• The Zelmenyaners By Moyshe Kulbak. Translated by Hillel Halkin.
One of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality.

• The Glatstein Chronicles By Jacob Glatstein. Translated by Maier Deshell and edited by Ruth R. Wisse.
In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, Jacob Glatstein—one of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day— traveled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother, a journey that became the basis for these two highly autobiographical novellas, in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe.

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

• 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.

• The World According to Itzik By Itzik Manger. 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.

• The Dybbuk and Other Writings By S. Ansky. 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 World War I journal The Destruction of Galicia.

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

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

• The End of Everything By David Bergelson. Translated by Joseph Sherman.
This radically modernist Yiddish novel traces the ambivalence and despair of a refined and sensitive young woman trapped in a disintegrating social order.

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