Author Description

Joseph (Yosl) Mlotek and his wife, Chana (Eleanor) Mlotek, have been names to conjure with in the world of Yiddish culture for more than half a century. Yosl was a Yiddish poet, a Yiddish teacher, an editor of the Yiddish Forverts, a Yiddish educational administrator (Director of the Educational Department of the Workmen s Circle), and the nexus of a world-wide communication network of writers and other users of Yiddish. These multiple activities were recognized and celebrated by the award to him of the sobriquet: the address for Yiddish in America. Chana is a distinguished Yiddish musicologist and historian of Yiddish folklore, and is a leading archivist of Yiddish music today at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; she and Yosl are the authors of four highly regarded volumes of compilations of Yiddish songs. In 1970, Yosl and Chana initiated an extremely popular column in the Forverts that was devoted to bringing the greats of Yiddish poetry and their poems to the attention of the readership, often rescuing some of them from relative obscurity, and often correctly demonstrating their rightful authorship of songs and poems that had been considered anonymous folksongs. As a result, they have been characterized as the Sherlock Holmes of Yiddish poetry. Yosl died in 2000, but Chana is still publishing the column at biweekly intervals. The current volume is a compilation of 37 of their most important columns, spanning a century of Yiddish poetry, from Mikhl Gordon to Abraham Sutzkever. It was published in Yiddish in Israel in 1974; this English translation by Barnett Zumoff (which also presents the Yiddish originals of the poems) is in honor of the 10th anniversary of Yosl s death. Yosl and Chana s son Mark, who edited this volume, is himself a distinguished scholar in the field of Yiddish culture.<br/><br/>Barnett Zumoff is probably the most prolific translator of Yiddish literature working today: he has published 18 volumes of translation of novels, short stories,