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, 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.