With Rake in Hand: Memoirs of a Yiddish Poet

A boon to Yiddish studies and American Jewish studies. . . . Any-one with a fondness for Yiddish literature will appreciate these detailed and evocative vignettes. Josh Lambert, author of Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

Provides compelling insights into the life of one of the well-known Yiddish poets, Joseph Rolnik. Agnieszka Legutko, author of Krakow’s Kazimierz: Town of Partings and Returns

Gerald Marcus’s sensitive translation is the perfect introduction to the life and work of a great and all-too-often overlooked modernist Yiddish poet. Marcus has taken Joseph Rolnik out of the footnotes and into the center of any future studies of Yiddish literature. Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch and Rhapsody in Schmaltz

An invaluable narrative of the life rural Jews lived during years of enlightenment and upheaval at the end of the nineteenth century, and then the difficulties and opportunities in New York in the early twentieth century. The story is at once very personal, with details about the author’s physical and emotional joys and pains, and his relationships with family and friends, as well as containing meticulous information about the mill that his father leased, the dairy, the fields, the holidays, the yeshivas and heders, and much more. . . A wealth of information is presented here for historians as well as students of literature. Recommended for collections of Yiddish in translation. AJL Newsletter