A Treasury of Yiddish Stories

A prominent literary critic and lifelong leftist, Irving Howe was the quintessential New York intellectual, a label he popularized in the 1960s. Born in the Bronx, New York, he turned a quarrelsome temperament into a vocation, writing and editing intellectual journals, criticizing capitalism, and championing democratic socialism. After rejecting Judaism as an adolescent, he changed course dramatically, immersing himself in Yiddish literature and the world of East European Jewish immigrants. Howe lectured widely and taught literature passionately. Dissent, the journal he founded and edited, survived him, continuing his legacy.

Yiddish writer, translator, and editor Eliezer Greenberg (Leyzer Grinberg) was born in Lipkany, Bessarabia, and in 1913 came to the United States, where he was educated at the University of Michigan and later settled in New York. Greenberg published poetry and books of critical essays, and he collaborated on a number of translations with the literary and social critic Irving Howe. Greenberg was director of Yiddish press relations for the American Jewish Committee and was a founder of the Yiddish branch of the PEN Club.