Yiddish Book Center

08/31/2026

We are excited to start working on the interviews we recorded in Brazil last month! After our Wexler Oral History Project director Christa Whitney presented at a panel at the BRASA conference about Yiddish in Brazil based on previously-recorded interviews, she took the opportunity to connect with local Yiddish speakers in Salvador, Bahía. Later in the month, she flew down to Porto Alegre where she connected with more Yiddish speakers. We look forward to adding these stories to our expanding collection.
Pictured:
1. Annita Bengard and Rosa Rabinovitz, friends, interviewed in Salvador, Bahia
2. A photo of the Escola Israelita da Bahia (Jewish school of Bahia) “Jacob Dinezon” from 1947. Rosa Fingergut, who provided the photo after her interview, is pictured in the second/third row wearing gingham with her hands on her classmates shoulders.
3. Dora and Simão Piltcher having a moment of levity while being interviewed in Porto Alegre.
4. Golda Goladinski-Gotlib driving the animals through the field in Quatro Irmãos, one of the Jewish agricultural colonies organized by the Jewish Colonisation Association Baron de Hirsh. Provided by Golda’s daughter, Ester, during an interview recorded in Porto Alegre.
5. Maria Folberg, who organizes a weekly Yiddish conversation group, interviewed in Porto Alegre.

08/30/2026

Meet the 2026–2027 translation fellows!

Nicholas Heskes is an art critic, artist, and translator. He began studying Yiddish at Columbia University while pursuing an MFA in visual art in 2017, before continuing his studies in the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program at YIVO in 2019. Heskes grew up in a home surrounded by Yiddish books written by his great-grandmother, Chicago-based memoirist Dora Schulner, which no one in his household could read. In 2020 he published a translation of the notebook she kept before her death in 1963 for In geveb’s blog. He regularly publishes critical reviews of art exhibitions in the Brooklyn Rail and published his first long-form piece of art writing, “The Subject Is Not the Cadaver,” on the limits of art and ethics, in the online art and culture journal Public Parking in January 2025. Heskes will be translating painter and poet Yonia Fain’s 1995 book of short stories Nyu-yorker adresn: dertseylungen (New York Addresses: Stories), a series of twelve stories—often perplexing and dream like in the tradition of Franz Kafka—that take place among immigrants in New York City.

08/28/2026

Der toes fun Honore de Balzac (Honore de Balzac's Mistake), by Natan Rybak, is a fictionalized account of Balzac's epistolary romance with—and eventual marriage to—the Polish noblewoman Ewelina Hanska, and of Balzac's visits to Ukraine, where Hanska lived. It was translated from the Ukrainian to Yiddish by Lazar Vayn. The cover design is by the Bauhaus artist Moshe Bahelfer.

08/25/2026

08/24/2026

This book by Noah Steinberg is all about the satirist, poet, journalist, and playwright (among other titles) Moyshe Nadir. Steinberg, a contemporary of Nadir's, had already included him in his 1917 Yung amerike (Young America) about the ten most important young American writers. Inside this book, published in 1926, is a deeper dive into Nadir's biography, cultural context, politics, and the themes that appear frequently in his works. The outside cover is just as textured as both the book's author and its subject.

08/21/2026

Meet the 2026–2027 Translation Fellowship cohort!

Ellen Cassedy is a Yiddish translator with a special interest in women writers. Her translations include Hand in Hand: An Autobiographical Novel, by Rashel Veprinski (with Anita Norich); On the Landing: Stories by Yenta Mash; Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel (with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub); and So We Died: A Memoir of Life and Death in the Ghetto of Šiauliai, Lithuania, by Levi Shalit (with Veronica Belling and Andrew Cassel). She is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust and Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie.

Ellen plans to translate Burning Lights and The First Encounter, two memoirs by Bella Chagall. Bella’s work describes her childhood in a well-to-do Jewish family in the city of Vitebsk (now in Belarus) and the beginning of her romance with her husband, Marc Chagall.

08/20/2026

If you've been searching for the perfect gift for the Yiddish type aficionado in your life, fear not: your search is over!

Drawn from our collection of historic wood and metal type and from the gorgeous typefaces found in Yiddish books, our new "Find Your Type" T-shirt showcases the rich visual heritage of Yiddish printing.

Get yours at the link in comments.

08/17/2026

Immerse yourself in the vibrant world of Yiddish culture with the audio tour of Yiddish: A Global Culture on the Bloomberg Connects app! The tour is narrated by Tony-nominated actress and singer (and long-time Yidstock favorite) Eleanor Reissa and is totally free, whether you're visiting or previewing the exhibition from home.

08/16/2026

It’s tempting to call Peretz Hirshbein the Yiddish Forrest Gump. Born to a milling family, he began to encounter secular Yiddish literature during his time studying in yeshivas. He was quickly recognized for his writing and met many of the other prominent Yiddish writers of his day, including I. L. Peretz. As his prominence grew, he founded a theater troupe that toured with great success for several years around Eastern Europe and was often hailed as the first troupe dedicated entirely to “artistic” Yiddish theater. In a moment of restlessness, he spent two months boating down the Dnieper River with his friend Mendl Elkin, who was later the chief librarian at YIVO for 24 years. Still writing, he tried his hand at farming in the Catskills and then in Argentina. His ship back to North America was sunk by the Germans during World War I, and he was briefly a prisoner of war. But the greatest adventure of his life was to come when he met the Canadian Yiddish poet Esther Shumiatcher and the two of them embarked on the most epic honeymoon of all time. They spent the 1920s traveling all around the world, collecting souvenirs in this steamer trunk. Hirshbein died in Los Angeles on this day in 1948, where he had settled with his family after finding work as a screenwriter. The Shumiatcher-Hirshbeyn trunk is on display in Yiddish: A Global Culture, our permanent exhibition.