Zlochov, My Home - (Excelsior Editions) by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Translations of selected poems by the Yiddish writer, covering the full scope of his oeuvre.

Described by Ruth Wisse as one of "the most original and distinctive voices in Yiddish poetry," Moyshe-Leybe Halpern (1886-1932) was born in Zlochov, in present-day western Ukraine. When he was twelve, his father sent him to Vienna to study sign painting, and during his ten years there he studied German literature and wrote his first poems in German before returning to Zlochov in 1907, where he began to write in Yiddish. The following year, he immigrated to New York, where a diverse community of Yiddish writers awaited him. During his lifetime, he published two volumes of poetry-In New York (1919) and The Golden Peacock (1924). A third volume was published posthumously, in 1934. Drawing from these three volumes, poet and translator Richard Fein offers a selection of Halpern's poetry that covers the full scope of his career. Fein's translations appear alongside the original Yiddish while an introduction by Larry Rosenwald situates Halpern in his historic and literary context.

Review Quotes

"[Halpern] was free of sentimentality and rich in irony, a virtuoso of form, politically engaged but not subservient to any ideology, the creator of half a dozen brilliant poetic personae and interlocutors, loved and known by Yiddish readers but never oversimplifying his poetry to win their praise.... His three books establish Halpern as a great poet: a Yiddish poet, a proletarian poet, an American poet, as broadly and intensely interesting a poet as Heine or Baudelaire or Frost. Yiddishists know this, of course. Some specialists and curious critics know it too-witness Harold Bloom's remark, that Halpern was a more impressive poet, in his experience as a reader, 'than any American-Jewish poet who has written in English.'" - From the introduction by Larry Rosenwald

"With the Yiddish en face, Zlochov, My Home can be used to learn the lost mother tongue, because Halpern speaks in a diction so spare yet so idiomatic, wearing many masks and having traveled very far-from the Golden Land to the electric chair-as vagabond, poor immigrant, lover, parent, balladeer, elegist and prophet, that (believe it or not) another great poet, American-born, Richard Fein by name, mastered Yiddish if for no other reason than to produce a twenty-first-century Moyshe-Leyb." - David G. Roskies, author of Yiddishlands: A Memoir