Synopses & Reviews
This is the first complete English-language translation of a classic of Yiddish literature, one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality. Four generations are depicted in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the profound changes brought on by the demands of the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism. The resultant intergenerational showdowns—including disputes over the introduction of electricity, radio, or electric trolley—are rendered with humor, pathos, and a finely controlled satiric pen. Moyshe Kulbak, a contemporary of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, picks up where Sholem Aleichem left off a generation before, exploring in this book the transformation of Jewish life.
Review
"The funniest Yiddish novel about Soviet central planning you'll read this year."-Jewish Book Council
Review
"Kulbaks work is a masterpiece. . . . His characters are funny and pathetic, his prose delicate and inventive. His novel ushers the reader not into Soviet Belorussia, but into a world entirely its own."—Forward Forward
Review
“A masterpiece…[Kulbaks] characters are funny and pathetic, his prose delicate and inventive.”—Ezra Glinter,
The ForwardReview
“The Zelmenyaners is always more sweet than sour. Kulbak brings a poignancy to his observations of a family, and a place, for which he clearly feels much affection.”—The Jewish Book Council
About the Author
Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was a leading Yiddish modernist poet, novelist, and dramatist. Arrested in 1937 during the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence, and given a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot at the age of 41. Hillel Halkin, an acclaimed translator of Hebrew and Yiddish fiction, is the author, most recently, of Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel and Yehuda Halevi. Sasha Senderovich holds a Ph.D. from the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.