Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets

by Amelia Glaser (Editor), David Weintraub (Editor), Dana Craft (Illustrator)

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.

428 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2005

About the author

Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and an award-winning translator. She is author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands and has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Quarterly, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Reviews

[Josh Horowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of Yiddish poetry from the communist Proletpen movement, in a wonderful bilingual presentation. I enjoyed it immensely.