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Proletpen
America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets
Edited by Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub
Translated by Amelia Glaser
Introduction by Dovid Katz, with illustrations by Dana Craft
Winner of the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies for Outstanding Translation and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title
“A useful and significant resource for scholars, students and teachers of Yiddish and American poetry, of Jewish and American history.”
—Kathryn Hellerstein, University of Pennsylvania
This unique anthology translates for the
first time a little-known body of Yiddish poetry by American
Yiddish proletarian writers who identified with the American
Left from the 1920s to the early 1950s. Dovid Katz explains how
a McCarthy-era “American Yiddish Political Correctness”
wrote these leftist poets out of the canon. Amelia Glaser and
David Weintraub correct this erasure, recovering the work of
thirty poets. Proletpen introduces the reader to an untold chapter
of America’s tumultuous history during the pre- and interwar
period, revealing the depth and power of Yiddish literature through
the backdrop of twentieth-century world politics.
Amelia Glaser received her Ph.D in comparative literature from Stanford University. Formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Institute and University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced
Judaic Studies, she is currently a visiting lecturer in Yiddish Language
and Literature at Stanford.
David Weintraub is executive director
of the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture. The Center
is in the forefront of revitalizing and reenergizing the Yiddish
language, helping to reveal the rich Yiddish culture and language
once so basic to Jewish life.
Additional Resources
Click here to read the first 15 pages of the introduction!
Praise
“Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub's anthology of poetry, composed by some of [Yiddish] culture's most talented members, [is an] important contribution to our understanding of a vital moment in American Jewish history.”
—Jeremy A. Dauber, Jerusalem Report
“The poems, . . . with a masterful translation by Amelia Glaser, are a window into the lives of a group of socialist writers who spoke out passionately about everything from racism to the plight of the worker and the grinding poverty they confronted on a daily basis.”
—Jewish Book Council
“A collection of great literary and academic merit, presenting a wide and multi-faceted selection of poets and poems.”
—Dror Abend-David, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal
“Yields unexpected treasures.”
—Julia Wolf Mazow, Lilith Magazine
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Larger images
New in Paperback!
February 2012
LC: 2004025729PJ
428 pp. 6 x 9
20 b/w illus.
Published in association with the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture
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