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.