The Naydus Press – förlag

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.

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 this novelistic account of his childhood in the late nineteenth-century Romanian countryside, Yiddish writer Yitskhok Horowitz charts his episodic memories in the literary voice of his child self. The sole Jewish family in the village of Popricani, the Horowitzes ran the local tavern, which provides the backdrop for this child's-eye view of events, from wolf chases to serpent possessions, and culminating in the dramatic local echoes of the Romanian Peasants' Revolt. By turns endearing and unnerving, The Tavern of Popricani was originally published in Yiddish in 1953. It offers an account of the rhythms of life for one Jewish family in the hinterlands of Eastern Europe.

These two beautifully illustrated picture books for young children by Yuriy Budiak were published first in Ukrainian in the 1920s and shortly thereafter in free Yiddish translations. As a testament to the universal appeal of children's literature and the joyful contact of cultures these translations represent, they are presented trilingually - with new English translations and, due to the rarity of the Ukrainian original of the second book, a Ukrainian back-translation from the Yiddish. Proceeds of the volume will go to support Ukrainian relief.

Mikhoel Burshtin's novel paints an unforgettable portrait of a community—delicate, tenacious, and vulnerable.Poland, 1935. Under the shadow of the Nazis' rise to the west, the Jews of Smolin continue to eke out their existence, marked by poverty, family tragedies, class conflict, and anti-Semitism. Their story unrolls from twin spools: Hersh Lustig, the orchard keeper who with Tevye-like vim acts as the beating heart and conscience of the town; and Gabriel Priver, the newly minted doctor who offers an outsider's critical view of his family's hometown. Entropy and modernity vie to erode Smolin's way of life, propelling it toward the inevitable cataclysm.By the Rivers of Mazovia is the third in a loose trilogy of novels exploring the decline of the Polish shtetl.