current volume

The new volume 29 of “Yerusholaymer Almanakh” has appeared this May. This is an unusually hefty collection that pays homage to some of the past masters of postwar 20^th century Yiddish poetry. However, well over 90 per cent of the volume’s 477 pages is dedicated to new works of fiction, poetry, drama, essays, memoirs and linguistic, ethnographic and literary studies by 44 contemporary authors, journalists and scholars from Israel, Europe, the Americas, and Australia.

This collection represents a wide cross-section of ongoing Yiddish literary creativity in various forms and genres along with a few veterans most of the authors belong to the middle and younger generation from twelve countries and five continents.

In addition to the first complete publication of Kobi Weitzner’s original farce comedy, the new volume offers three bitter-sweet stories by Moyshe Lemster describing the Jewish life in postwar Soviet Moldova, as well as new stories by Boris Sandler, Thomas Soxberger, Ber Kotlerman, Miriam Hoffman, Gilles Rozier and documentary prose by Misha Lev and Mordehai Yushkovsky. Poetry is represented in this “Almanakh” by new works of Rivka Basman, Alexander Shpiglblat, Velvl Chernin, Beruriah Wiegand, Moshe Sachar and many others.

Studies and scholarly publications in this volume include, among others, a semantic and socio-cultural analysis of the rhetoric used at the Czernovitz 1908 Yiddish language and culture conference, an in-depth linguistic analysis of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish publications, a riveting report on ethnographic interviews that were conducted with prewar-born Yiddish speakers in Podolia, Bukovina and Moldova in the last seven years, as well as studies on 20^th century Yiddish poetry in early 20^thcentury Ukraine, prewar Germany and postwar London, on modernist Yiddish poetry in the 1920s-1930s New York and Chicago and many others.

This volume also publishes some of the very first works of a number of younger authors. These include the poetry of Marek Tuszewicki (Cracow) and Fishke de Gal (Cambridge, Mass.), two stories by Emil Kalin (Tel Aviv), and Alec Burko’s (New York) penetrating discussion of prewar Soviet antireligious campaigns contrasted with late 20^th and early 21^st century atheist movement led by some prominent American and British scientists, academics and intellectuals. Ariel Evan Mayse (Cambridge & Jerusalem) offers an audacious experimental back-translation of three droshes by R. Menachem Nochum of Chernobyl into their original oral Yiddish form.

It is impossible to name each and every one of its esteemed authors due to this volume’s exceptionally broad scope. The complete content can be seen in the attached PDF file (please, see below)..