The poet Bertha Kling attracted some of New York's leading Yiddish writers, artists, and musicians to her literary salon. They gathered every weekend for several decades in her apartment on 181st St. in the West Bronx. Join Dr. Steven Payne in conversation with Yiddish Book Center bibliographer and editorial director, David Mazower, for a virtual tour of Bertha Kling's neighborhood in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. We'll see the neighborhood and apartment buildings where Bertha Kling lived and hear some Yiddish verse inspired by the local Bronx parks.

Steven Payne is the Librarian and Archivist at the Bronx County Historical Society. Steven completed his doctoral studies at Fordham University in 2019 in the history of ancient Mediterranean religion and social movements, though he has long cultivated wide-ranging interests in more modern contexts as well. At the Society, he is especially interested in documenting and illuminating the daily lives, cultures, and struggles of the Bronx’s shifting working-class populations from the nineteenth century until the present.