Left-wing writers like Frume Halpern constituted an important part of American Yiddish literature in the 20th century. But until recently, many have been absent from the English-language library. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub has helped to correct this lacuna, offering lucid translations that capture the spirit and idiom of Halpern’s aesthetics and social consciousness. From an unlikely friendship between Jewish and Black women to a synagogue whose elderly congregants are slowly dying, Halpern’s moving soliloquies describe everyday struggles with economic, racial, and gender disparities in mid-century America.
–Amelia M. Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle From Scottsboro to Palestine
On both sides of the Atlantic, Frume Halpern’s healers and disrupters, dreamy butchers and ambitious spinsters, aging newspaper vendors and untutored mothers, comrades and believers—all strain to make sense of their lives within the contradictory values and challenges of the 20th century. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub’s sensitive translations and detailed analysis highlight Halpern’s artistic commitment to make visible a seemingly infinite number of protagonists whose struggles are marginalized and unnoticed. With Blessed Hands, Taub has further expanded and enriched the burgeoning body of Yiddish literature in English translation.
—Irena Klepfisz, author of Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021
Frume Halpern’s stories illuminate the lives of those who give too much of themselves in order to survive—like the mother who sells her own breast milk to the wealthy while her own baby cries in hunger. I was moved again and again by characters like the elderly couple who did not mingle with neighbors and instead “took refuge in their own slice of poverty.” This vibrant, deeply soulful translation by the distinguished writer and translator Yermiyahu Ahron Taub—who writes that he feels Halpern’ s writing “in his skin”—honors Halpern’s precision, humanity, and vision, and brings all of it to life.
—Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God and Wolf Lamb Bomb
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub’s translation of Frume Halpern’s Blessed Hands at last brings to readers this extraordinary author’s complete collection of short stories. Halpern’s radical compassion, her powerful commitment to those whose social position, or physical limitations, leaves them outcast from the promised land of America makes for compelling, unforgettable fiction. Taub’s nuanced translation brings Halpern’s stunning and moving words fully to light; his extensive afterword helps contextualize Halpern’s remarkable accomplishment.
—Rhea Tregebov, author of Rue des Rosier