Have I Got a Story for You: Reading Resources

A selection of the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books Club

Have I Got a Story for You is a collection of stories culled from the pages of the Jewish Daily Forward (or Forverts), the best-known and most successful Yiddish newspaper in history. Founded in 1897 by a group of socialist writers and editors, the Forward achieved an influence and eminence that defined its time and place. Abraham Cahan, the newspaper’s founding editor, called it a “living novel,” capturing, as it did, the entire flourishing (and sometimes floundering) world of Yiddish America. It welcomed generations of immigrants to the United States, brought them news of Europe and the Middle East, and provided them with sundry comforts such as comic strips and noodle kugel recipes.

It also published some of the most acclaimed Yiddish writers of all time, and the Forward’s published fiction came to constitute an immense artistic trove that eventually, in translation, introduced Yiddish literary culture to English-speaking Americans. But for every Isaac Bashevis Singer, who contributed to the Forward for over fifty years, twenty or more important writers, many of them women, remained untranslated and unknown. In this collection forty-two Yiddish-language stories are available for the first time to English-language audiences, and they include everything from wartime novellas to avant-garde fiction to satirical sketches about immigrant life in New York. Taken together, these stories reveal the challenges that faced Jews throughout this time, including immigration, modernization, poverty, assimilation, two world wars, and changing forms of Jewish identity. Individually, they exhibit the talents of their creators; collectively, they offer a picture of millions of readers and the imaginative landscape of an entire immigrant community.

Organized by themes like immigration, modernity, war, and Eastern European life, Have I Got a Story for You contains the work of twenty-six writers, including ten women. Each one of the stories reflects its particular milieu, nestled, as each was, amid world news, the Bintel Brief advice column, reports on labor and union politics, comics, recipes, movie reviews, and advertisements for Ex-Lax and grand pianos. Yet as with all great fiction, these stories transcend their circumstances. Have I Got a Story for You is both an important contribution to our understanding of the Jewish experience in America and the world and a celebration of the power of literature to express human truth.

Four Questions

To get you started before you crack open the collection, here are four questions to keep in mind while you read.

  1. Is there an author or story in this collection you liked best? What about their work appealed to you?
  2. Were you surprised by any of the stories in this collection? Were they what you expected to find in the pages of an American Yiddish newspaper?
  3. Did your view of Jewish immigrants or immigration change while reading these stories? How do you think the stories reflect the lives and concerns of their readers?
  4. How do these stories compare to other Yiddish literature you’ve read? Do you think their publication in the Forward helped make them what they are?

Ezra Glinter

Explore the below sections to learn more about Ezra Glinter and Have I Got a Story for You

Resources from editor Ezra Glinter
The history of the Forward
The Forverts today

Resources from editor Ezra Glinter

Shortly after Have I Got a Story for You was published, editor Ezra Glinter was interviewed by the Center’s Lisa Newman for an episode of The Shmooze podcast. You can listen to their discussion here:

In an essay for the Jewish Book Council, Glinter described the essential role that Yiddish leksikons, or biographical dictionaries, played in his research, and the specialized Forward leksikon in particular. You can read Glinter’s essay on the JBC’s website, but you can access the leksikon he discusses, along with many others, in our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.

Read Ezra Glinter’s essay about Yiddish biographical dictionaries

Read the Forverts leksikon in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library

Have I Got a Story for You was greeted with general acclaim when it was published in 2016. This particularly insightful review-essay was published in the online Yiddish journal In Geveb.

Read "Nothing Backwards about the Forward’s New Anthology"

The history of the Forward

There were many books written in Yiddish about the Forward and its history that you can access on our website. Here are just two of them: Der gayst fun forverts (The Spirit of the Forward) by Cahan’s successor and longtime editor Hillel Rogoff, and the Forward Almanac, published in 1935 and edited by the paper’s influential manager, Baruch Charney Vladek.

Read The Spirit of the Forward

Read The Forward Almanac

Each piece in Have I Got a Story for You is dated, indicating its original publication in the newspaper. Now, most of the Yiddish Forward has been digitized and published online by the Jewish Historical Press archive, a project of the National Library of Israel and Tel Aviv University. If you’re so inclined, you can go searching through the archive and find the original of each of the stories.

Read the Forverts at the Historical Jewish Press archive

Abraham Cahan was more than just a newspaper editor; he was also an accomplished writer of fiction in English, and his books still stand up today. Here the Yiddish Book Center has assembled a collection of teaching resources for Cahan’s novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. The novella is in the public domain, and you can read it in full online.

Read Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto

Access teaching resources for Cahan’s novella

There are a few good books on Abraham Cahan and the history of the Forward, including The Downtown Jews by Ronald Sanders, Seth Lipsky’s The Rise of Abraham Cahan, and Cahan’s own autobiography, The Education of Abraham Cahan. For a shorter, but still thorough, introduction to the subject, you can read this essay by editor Ezra Glinter at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Read "Looking Back at The Forward: 'The Rise of Abraham Cahan'"

In two other pieces for the Jewish Book Council, Glinter highlighted twelve historic Forward front pages that he came across in the course of his research, and translated a piece of nonfiction reportage by novelist I. J. Singer about a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1934.

Read about twelve Forward front pages

Read I. J. Singer on Nazis at Madison Square Garden

Have I Got a Story for You is a collection of fiction, and therefore does not include one of the Forward’s most popular and defining features: the Bintel Brief, or “bundle of letter,” an advice column started by Abraham Cahan in 1906. Nonetheless, here you can read a selection of letters and answers translated from the Bintel Brief, and listen to a podcast interview with artist Liana Finck, whose 2014 book, A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York, re-imagined the iconic advice column in graphic novel form.

Read a selection from the Bintel Brief

Listen to an interview with Liana Finck:

The Forverts today

In 1990 the longstanding Yiddish Forverts launched an English-language edition under the editorship of Seth Lipsky. Among the English Forward's first staff members was author and editor Jonathan Rosen. In 2001 Rosen delivered the Melinda Rosenblatt Lecture at the Yiddish Book Center, under the title "Forward and Back: A Journey Between Worlds."

Listen to a lecture by Jonathan Rosen

Although the contents of Have I Got a Story for You date mostly from the earlier twentieth century, it also includes a few more contemporary selections, the most recent by former Forverts editor Boris Sandler and dating from 2015. In fact, the Yiddish Forward is still a going concern, and still occasionally publishes fiction, though it now appears only online. It also has a YouTube channel, which contains a treasure trove of Yiddish videos on a wide variety of subjects, from Jewish history to cooking.

Visit the website of the Yiddish Forward

Watch videos by the Yiddish Forward on YouTube

Over the years the Center’s Wexler Oral History Project has conducted interviews with many people connected to the Forward. Here are interviews with Rukhl Schaechter, the current editor-in-chief of Yiddish Forward, and Alec (Leyzer) Burko, who worked as a staff writer for the paper.

Watch an oral history interview with Rukhl Schaechter

Watch an oral history interview with Alec (Leyzer) Burko

Accusations that the Forward betrayed its founding left-wing politics dogged the paper almost since its beginning, and those criticisms still recur today. In this piece for the Columbia Journalism Review writer Mairav Zonszein gives an account of how the paper, in her view, “lost the left.”

Read an essay by Mairav Zonszein in the Columbia Journalism Review