The Clever Little Tailor by Solomon Simon
Solomon Simon’s The Clever Little Tailor follows the adventures of a brave tailor who solves mysteries and overcomes great obstacles, thanks to his keen wit. This charming novel, deeply rooted in Eastern-European Jewish folkways and humor, is now accessible to the wider public for the first time through an English translation by David Forman. The bilingual text appears alongside stunning illustrations by Yehuda Blum.
Solomon Simon (Author): Born in Belarus in 1895, Simon came to the US as a teenager. After serving in the US Army in World War I, he began a career as a dentist. Simon was a prolific writer, publishing 20 full-length Yiddish books and scores of articles and essays. His work ranged from biblical exegesis to folk stories, from autobiography to commentary on modern Jewish life and identity. A dedicated educator, Simon served as the director of a Sholem Aleichem Folkshul, taught Bible study groups, and was the president of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. He was also an editor of the organization’s children’s magazine, the Kinder Zhurnal, where The Clever Little Tailor first appeared as a serial. Simon is best remembered as a children’s author; his treatment of the Chelm stories in Yiddish (Di Heldn fun Khelm) and in English (The Wise Men of Helm and their Merry Tales; More Wise Men of Helm) brought these stories into the homes of generations of American Jewish children. The Rabbi’s Bible, his abridged version of the Hebrew Bible with commentaries for children, was widely used in Sunday schools for a half century. Simon died in 1970.
David R. Forman (Translator): The grandson of Yiddish author Solomon Simon, Dr. Forman was first a calligrapher and graphic artist, then a psychology researcher and college professor, before finally returning to his early love of writing. His poetry has been published online, in anthologies, and in literary journals such as Cimarron Review. Dr. Forman began studying Yiddish in his fifties to fulfill a lifelong vow to read and translate his grandfather’s work. He lives in Ithaca, NY, where he teaches a beginning Yiddish class at Cornell and catalogs Yiddish manuscripts for Cornell University Library.
Yehuda Blum (Illustrator): A freelance illustrator, Mr. Blum was the staff illustrator at the Yiddish Forward from 2015-2019, where his diverse artistic styles gave the paper its distinctive look. Blum is a fluent Yiddish speaker who is continuing the family tradition of working in Yiddish publishing; his grandfather was a typesetter for the Yiddish Forward.
Emil and Karl by Jacob Glatstein
Jacob Glatstein’s unforgettable Holocaust novel Emil and Karl is an exciting and heart-wrenching story of two friends – one Jewish, one Christian – who must find safety on the streets of Vienna in the dark days after Kristallnacht. The English translation, by Jeffrey Shandler, will appear for the first time alongside Glatstein’s original text, in agreement with Square Fish Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers. The volume will include entrancing illustrations by Yehuda Blum, based on photographs taken in Vienna in the fall of 1938.
Jacob Glatstein (Author): One of the foremost Yiddish writers of the twentieth century, Jacob Glatstein was born in Lublin in 1896 and immigrated to New York in 1914. Glatstein is best known as a modernist poet. A co-founder in 1920 of the Inzikhistn (Introspectivists), a group of avant-garde American Yiddish writers, he published thirteen books of poetry during his career. In addition, Glatstein was renowned as a literary and cultural critic and as the author of two novels for adults, inspired by his journey back to Poland in the mid-1930s. During World War II and continuing until his death in 1971, Glatstein was a leading figure in Yiddish literary responses to the Holocaust. Emil and Karl, his only novel for young readers, was among his very first efforts to address Jewish persecution in Nazi-occupied Europe. Published in New York in 1940, it is the earliest novel for young readers on this subject in any language.
Jeffrey Shandler (Translator): A professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, Dr. Shandler is the author of Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture , Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History, and Yiddish: Biography of a Language (forthcoming), among other titles. His edited volumes include Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory.
Yehuda Blum (Illustrator): A freelance illustrator, Mr. Blum was the staff illustrator at the Yiddish Forward from 2015-2019, where his diverse artistic styles gave the paper its distinctive look. Blum is a fluent Yiddish speaker who is continuing the family tradition of working in Yiddish publishing; his grandfather was a typesetter for the Yiddish Forward.
Hanka by Jacob Pat
Jacob Pat’s Hanka: The Ghetto Queen Sings at Night (working title) is a searing account of the life of Pat’s niece, Khane “Hanka” Levine, a teenager imprisoned in the Bialystok ghetto who served as the youngest member of the city’s underground resistance movement. A work of journalism and memoir presented as a gripping narrative for young readers, Hanka explores the different forms that Jewish resistance took during the Holocaust and the many ways young people fought back against incredible odds.
Originally published in Yiddish in 1964 and until now unavailable in English, Kinder-Loshn Publication’s bilingual edition will present the original Yiddish text alongside Anita Gallers’ English translation and rare photographs of Hanka and other members of the Jewish resistance movement whose lives and fates are recounted in this unique and vital book.
Jacob Pat (Author): Jacob Pat (1890-1966) was a leading cultural and political figure of interwar Polish Jewry, as well as a pioneering Yiddish children’s book writer, teacher and journalist. Raised in a traditional religious home in Bialystok, Pat became a secular revolutionary, serving multiple stints in prison in Czarist Russia for his activities with the Jewish Labor Bund. After World War I, Pat played a leading role in founding and helping to run Poland’s secular Yiddish school system, TSISHO, and created beloved allegorical works of children’s literature that bridged Jewish religious tradition with radical politics. A 1938 fundraising trip to New York to raise money for TSISHO left Pat stranded upon the outbreak of WWII. While Pat’s son Emanuel (Monye) Patt and daughter Naomi (Emma) Pat Zelmanowicz managed to escape Poland by way of Japan and eventually settled in New York, Pat would not know the fate of the rest of his family until after the war. Upon his return to Poland in 1944, Pat learned that his sister Sheyne and her daughter Hanka had both, unbeknownst to each other, been resistance leaders in the Bialystok Ghetto. Although Pat would publish multiple book-length journalistic accounts of the fate of Polish Jewry in the 1940s, he did not commit his own family’s experience to paper until the very end of his life, choosing to write Hanka as a book for Yiddish-speaking youth.
Anita Gallers (Translator): Anita Gallers is Jacob Pat’s great-granddaughter and, like him, a writer and educator. Growing up in the Bronx, she graduated from a Workers Circle Yiddish School and attended Yiddishist summer camps. Gallers continued her Yiddish studies through the Yiddish Book Center and YIVO. A published poet, Gallers serves on the Editorial Board of the Florence Poets Society’s annual poetry anthology, Silkworm. She is a Senior Academic Advisor for Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and holds a PhD in Spanish and African American Studies from Yale.
The Old Toy Chest by Esther Himelstein
“Bunny,” she said, “we are only stuffed animals. How much noise can we possibly make jumping up and down?…”
Esther Himelstein (Author) is a Yiddish and English poet, short story and children’s book writer. She grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home and ever since studying Yiddish at Columbia University’s Uriel Weinreich Program, she has found her passion: the Yiddish language. Her poetry has been published in Vidervuks: A New Generation of Yiddish Writers (1989) and several English-language journals and publications. Her first Yiddish children’s book, Dos Kleyne Vekerl (The Little Alarm Clock), appeared in 1997. This is her second children’s book in Yiddish.
Tanya Panova (Illustrator) is a book illustrator with a background in linguistics. She collaborates with the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project and teaches Yiddish in Germany where she lives. The Old Toy Chest is her first experience combining her two passions – Yiddish and book illustration.
Uh-oh! by Jenny Kjærbo
Order in English. Order in Yiddish.
Uh-oh! (in Yiddish: Gevald!) tells the story of a wayward young puffin who has a series of misadventures when he is left in charge of his baby brother’s egg. Translated into English by Jordan Kutzik and into Yiddish by Arun Viswanath, this charming metaphor for a child learning to accept a younger sibling will delight readers young and old. Featuring Kjærbo’s delightful illustrations, Kinder-Loshn Publication is proud to be bringing this Faroese book to a wider audience in Yiddish and English.
Jenny Kjærbo (Author/Illustrator): Raised on the island of Suðuroy in the Faroe Islands, Kjærbo is a graphic designer based in Copenhagen. Her children’s books have appeared in Faroese, Danish, Hungarian, and Spanish.
Arun “Arele” Schaechter Viswanath (Yiddish Translator): A polyglot scion of a prominent family of Yiddish cultural activists, Viswanath is also the Yiddish translator of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.