Foreword by Elie Wiesel
Translated by Mary Schulman
Edited by Mary Schulman, Joan Braman, and David Weintraub
This collection brings together in English the work of Peretz Markish, one of the most gifted and remarkable Jewish poets of the Soviet Union. Suffused with a consciousness of suffering, homelessness, and inevitably the Holocaust, these modernist poems are meditative, elegiac, and prophetic in tone, and touch on the themes of loss, loneliness, displacement, war, and the yearning for renewal. Inextricably bound up with Markish's Eastern European Jewish identity, they are also intensely personal, modern, and universal.
This is the first publication of his poetry in English, and includes both the English translation and the original Yiddish text.
About the Author: Considered the Jewish Byron by many, Peretz Markish (1895-1852) was born in Volhynia, Ukraine, and went on to write forty works in Yiddish, twenty of which were translated into Russian. In 1921, in Warsaw, he formed the group called The Gang, which struggled against realism in literature, and he co-edited the expressionist Khaliastre Almanakh, which contained illustrations by Marc Chagall. His own poems expressed Jewish sorrow and hope. In 1926 he returned to the Soviet Union where he produced his best-known works, including those expressing Soviet patriotism and his grief at the extermination of the Jews. He was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1939, and executed in 1952, accused of Jewish nationalism.
