Description
Product Description
You don't need to be Jewish to love Levy's rye bread, nor do you need to read Yiddish to appreciate these wise tales. This engaging collection offers access to modern works--translated for the first time into English--for anyone who appreciates a well-told story rich with timeless wisdom. A year-round book for families. Includes a comprehensive introduction on Yiddish culture.
Largely overlooked or forgotten, these hidden treasures from the early and middle twentieth century by some of the most respected Yiddish writers of their time—including Jacob Kreplak, Moyshe Nadir, and Rachel Shabad—remain surprisingly resonant for a contemporary audience. Folktales can be scary, as wrongdoers often get their comeuppance in unsuspected or even macabre ways, but the reinvigoration of values sometimes perceived as quaint makes for a stimulating read.
In this collection you’ll meet a king who loves honey so much that instead of ruling over his people, he licks honey all day. You’ll ponder the conundrum of the moon, who longs for a playmate—but where to find a child who isn’t fast asleep at night? You’ll enter a forest in which the king of mushrooms and the queen of ants coexist autonomously but face the same threat: the little hands and trampling feet of children at play. And you’ll learn how flavoring food with the salt from tears can pose a challenging dilemma.
"Collected and arranged with the lightest of touches by David Stromberg, this gathering of little-known Yiddish tales enchants with an always-new old-world magic.
In the Land of Happy Tears is utterly and actively refreshing, for the wide-eyed child in every grownup and children wising up everywhere." —poet, translator, and MacArthur Prize winner Peter Cole
Review
"18 Yiddish short stories . . . newly translated into English. These stories offer a window into this canon for non-Yiddish speakers. Appended with a fascinating glossary of 'untranslatables' and notes on the original authors." --
Booklist Online"The stories, seamlessly translated by a sizable team, are all a few pages in length and lend themselves to reading aloud and discussion. . . . Yiddishkeit that is entertaining, meaningful, and very much still relevant." --
Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
DAVID STROMBERG is a writer, translator, and literary scholar. His translations have appeared in the
New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and
Asymptote, and his fiction in
Ambit, Chicago Literati, and the
East Bay Review. He
is the author of four collections of single-panel cartoons, including
BADDIES, and a critical study,
Narrative Faith. He lives in Jerusalem.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
In the Land of Happy Tears
Moyshe Nadir
Listen here, children. Do you want to hear something you’ve never heard before? Then sit yourselves down on this bench, like good children, and I’ll tell you a story.
If you’ve ever studied geography, then you know that not far from Mount Hotzemklotzem lies a river called the Ampsel.
All week long, the river Ampsel spews a boiling sealing wax that makes it impossible to even get close. If you do, you instantly get sealed up--a package ready for the Angel of Souls, who stands by with an inkwell, immediately writes down an address, and sends you off to the World to Come.
But once in 666 years, when the Sabbath falls on a Wednesday, you can approach the river backward so it thinks you’re actually walking away. And when you’re just close enough, you throw a blue onion over your shoulder and say three times:
Echepeche meche-merly.
Little river, it’s still early.
This scares the river Ampsel, and it freezes with trembling waves on both sides, like the angry lips of an irate person whose mouth has opened and can’t be shut. And that’s when you jump off Mount Hotzemklotzem, sitting on your hands--which you hold together under yourself like a little bench--and start flying wherever you want. You fly for a day