Judaic traditions in literature, music, and art

Nineteen to the Dozen contains some of the most innovative writing by a master Yiddish writer. Many of these short stories have never before been translated into English. The author of classic Yiddish novels and short stories, Sholem Aleichem is best known for having inspired Fiddler on the Roof. His artistic vision was rooted both in the shtetl and in the city of Kiev, where he produced stories at a high literary level. This book epitomizes his ability to evoke the voices of Yiddish speakers. In each of these monologues written between 1901 and 1916, a man or woman comes forward to tell the story. The implied listeners - a rabbi, a doctor, or the author himself - say virtually nothing. Sholem Aleichem pretends to have transcribed these private performances for the reader's benefit. Five women and seven men tell their own tales. They are rich and poor, educated and ignorant. These narratives provide a unique portrayal of Eastern European Jewish society, and they go a long way toward demystifying the shtetl, which has too often been the object of undue nostalgia.

The writings of David Bergelson - virtually unknown to readers in the United States - are now available in this exciting collection Composed of two short stories and a novella, this volume brings to life Bergelson's rich, elegiac prose. Golda Werman's highly literate translation perfectly captures his elusive literary style. Bergelson's writings evoke the declining world of small-town Eastern European Jews. His world captures the dreariness of the uncommitted life. His characters are cast adrift in a society whose traditions are coming unhinged by powerful modernist forces. In her Introduction Werman offers readers an engaging and tragic portrait of Bergelson, who was arrested on orders from Stalin and died in a prison camp in 1952.

"The events of this novel unfold through the eyes of Hershl, who leaves his small town to become educated only to return to the Pale of Settlement in the wake of the pogroms in 1881. S.Y. Abramovitsh's famed epic novel explores the social upheaval of Russian Jews who are forced by poverty to leave their homes. As he traces the dissolution of the Eastern European shtetl and traditional Jewish life, Abramovitsh narrates a coming-of-age story of a shtetl child with a fresh and inspired perspective. The novel achieved canonical status both in its Yiddish original and in its Hebrew version, but under the title, In the Vale of Tears." "In this work Michael Wex renders the time-honored tale with the skill and ease of a modern storyteller and humorist. Abramovitsh's artistry lies not in the plot but in the descriptions and ever-shifting narrative voice. Sometimes the narrator (Mendele the Book Peddler) speaks from within the shtetl and sometimes from outside; and often he interweaves the high rhetorical prose of Hershl himself, reborn by the novel's end as Heinrich Cohen."--Jacket.