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There and Back Again: Jacob Glatstein’s Voyage Home

Featuring: Ezra Glinter

In the 1920s and ’30s, Yiddish poet and Polish native Jacob Glatstein was one of the most creative and energetic forces in New York Yiddish literature. In 1934 he returned to Poland to visit his dying mother. When he returned, he described his experiences in two autobiographical novellas, now republished as The Glatstein Chronicles, that make it apparent the voyage marked a turning point in his creative life and career.

Ezra Glinter is the Yiddish Book Center’s senior staff writer and editor. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Ezra attended McGill University and New York University, where he received a master’s degree from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. For five years Ezra worked as the deputy culture editor of the Forward newspaper, where he edited Have I Got a Story for You, a landmark anthology of Yiddish fiction in translation. In addition to the Forward, Ezra’s writing has appeared in the New Republic, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and The Paris Review, among other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, for Yale University Press.