Hand in Hand - by Rashel Veprinski (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

New York, 1918. One fateful winter night, Miriam Eidelberg finds herself strolling across the Williamsburg Bridge with her literary hero, the man whose poems she knows by heart. Nyezhiner, a star of his Yiddish artistic clique, is beguiled by the wistful girl at his side. But Miriam is married with a young daughter, while Nyezhiner, who is ten years her senior, has a wife, five children, and a womanizing reputation. Can these lovers find in each other the fulfillment they yearn for-- and at what cost? This headily bittersweet novel takes us into the " Jewish tumult" of early 20th-century Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, where recent immigrants from Eastern Europe toil as shoemakers and tailors by day and cultivate a lively intelligentsia by night. An indelible portrait of a milieu and a timeless mapping of desire and freedom, Hand in Hand lays bare the human heart in all its frailty, tenderness, and tyranny.

About the Author

Ellen Cassedy is a Yiddish translator with a special interest in women writers. Her translations include On the Landing: Stories by Yenta Mash (2018) and Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel (with co-translator Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, 2016). She is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (2012) and Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie (2022). Her awards include the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction and the Leviant Memorial Prize from the Modern Language Association. Her website is www.ellencassedy.com. Anita Norich, Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, is the translator of Desires by Tsilye Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), and numerous short stories, among them previously untranslated stories by Israel Joshua Singer (Collected Works of I. J. Singer). She is the author of numerous books, including Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century (2013). Rashel Veprinski was born in the town of Ivankov, near Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1893. In 1907, after the death of her father, she and her mother and siblings moved to New York City, where she began working in a sweatshop. She attended night school and read work by Yiddish-American poets. In 1918 she published her first poem, in the Yiddish journal Di naye velt (The New World), and then published poetry, fiction, and articles in numerous Yiddish magazines and journals. She published numerous books and also compiled Mani Leyb's literary oeuvre after his death. She died in New York in 1981.