Moyshe Kulbak - Böcker

A masterpiece from one of Yiddish literature's true virtuosi, Moyshe Kulbak's satiric poem from 1933, Childe Harold of Dysna, appears here for the first time in a complete English translation. At once an exuberant celebration of Yiddish language and a searing indictment of capitalist excess, Kulbak's long poem follows the journey of its protagonist from small town Eastern Europe to the metropolis of Weimar Berlin. Drawing on his own experiences in Berlin in the early 1920s, Kulbak offers us a fresh perspective on life in interwar Berlin, and does so in one of the truly great pyrotechnic displays in Yiddish poetry. Robert Adler Peckerar's stunning translation conveys simultaneously Kulbak's verbal brilliance and his searing critique. This beautiful volume includes an introduction by Boris Dralyuk, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and stunning illustrations by Beynish.

In Raysn, Moyshe Kulbak reclaims the landscape of present-day Belarus as a mythic homeland for Jewish culture. First published in 1922, Raysn blends biblical allusion, folk imagery, and modernist poetics to imagine a shared past between Jews and Belarusians - a symbolic union rooted in forests, rivers, and ancient ties. Kulbak's poem lives as both a literary epic and a political vision. Writing in the wake of war, revolution, and the brief independence of the Belarusian People's Republic, Kulbak situates Yiddish in the heart of European literary tradition and stakes a claim for Jewish belonging in the region's cultural history. Drawing on Romantic forms and his own ideals, Raysn offers a poetic response to the national movements reshaping Eastern Europe. Set against the backdrop of early Soviet indigenization policies and the flourishing of Yiddish culture in 1920s Belarus, Kulbak's work stands as a hopeful vision of multicultural coexistence. Jason Wagner's lively translation invites readers to rediscover Raysn as a modern epic of memory, identity, and imagined futures.