Containing nearly 50,000 entries and 33,000 subentries, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary emphasizes Yiddish as a living language that is spoken in many places around the world. The late Mordkhe Schaechter collected and researched spoken and literary Yiddish in all its varieties and this landmark dictionary reflects his vision for present-day and future Yiddish usage. The richness of dialect differences and historical developments are noted in entries ranging from "agriculture" to "zoology" and include words and expressions that can be found in classic and contemporary literature, newspapers, and other sources of the written word and have long been used by professionals and tradesmen, in synagogues, at home, in intimate life, and wherever Yiddish-speaking Jews have lived and worked.

Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations. And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859–1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl.

Set in the impoverished and bustling Lower East Side of Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century, The God of Vengeance is a memorable urban drama of intrigue and romantic liaisons. The God of Vengeance is a gritty, unflinching yet deftly written play, wherein the complexities of human existence and flaws are explored to their fullest. A brothel owner lives with his family above his place of business, and strives to keep his young daughter innocent of what goes on in the establishment that provides their livelihood. However, the girl's curiosity gets the better of her; upon witnessing the sordid goings on, she rapidly develops a fascination for one of the working girls. First published in 1906, and sporadically staged in the decades to follow, the play is unique for featuring a lesbian love affair - a matter shocking and taboo for its era. After one performance in English in 1923, the entire cast was placed under arrest for indecency. Critics of the time were divided; many noted its artistic qualities, but roundly condemned its frank and unabashed depiction of female homosexuality. Others proclaimed it a great drama, and a culturally significant product of the Yiddish diaspora of New York City.

Abraham Karpinowitz (1913–2004) was born in Vilna, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania), the city that serves as both the backdrop and the central character for his stories. He survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and, after two years in an internment camp on the island of Cyprus, moved to Israel, where he lived until his death. In this collection, Karpinowitz portrays, with compassion and intimacy, the dreams and struggles of the poor and disenfranchised Jews of his native city before the Holocaust. His stories provide an affectionate and vivid portrait of poor working women and men, like fishwives, cobblers, and barbers, and people who made their living outside the law, like thieves and prostitutes. This collection also includes two stories that function as intimate memoirs of Karpinowitz’s childhood growing up in his father’s Vilna Yiddish theater. Karpinowitz wrote his stories and memoirs in Yiddish, preserving the particular language of Vilna’s lower classes. In this graceful translation, Mintz deftly preserves this colorful, often idiomatic Yiddish, capturing Karpinowitz’s unique voice and rendering a long-vanished world for English-language readers.

When young Zalmen Itzkowitz steps off the train on a dark, dreary day at the close of the nineteenth century, the residents of Miloslavka have no idea what’s in store for them. Zalmen is a freethinker who has come to the rural town to earn his living as a tutor. Yet, rather than teach Hebrew, he plans to teach his students the Russian language and other secular subjects. Residents of the town quickly become divided, with some regarding Itzkowitz as the devil’s messenger and others supportive of his progressive ideas. Set during the time of the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment that was sweeping through Europe, Pioneers is a charming tale of one ambivalent young man’s attempt to join the movement and a compassionate portrait of one shtetl on the brink of transformation.

Poetry. Translated from the Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon. Foreword by Edward Hirsch.

A son learns more about his father than he ever could have imagined when a mysterious piece of art is unexpectedly restored to him After receiving an unexpected call from the Australian consulate, Matt Santos becomes aware of a painting that he believes was looted from his family in Hungary during the Second World War. To recover the painting, he must repair his strained relationship with his harshly judgmental father, uncover his family history, and restore his connection to his own Judaism. Along the way to illuminating the mysteries of his past, Matt is torn between his doting girlfriend, Tracy, and his alluring attorney, Rachel, with whom he travels to Budapest to unearth the truth about the painting and, in turn, his family. As his journey progresses, Matt’s revelations are accompanied by equally consuming and imaginative meditations on the painting and the painter at the center of his personal drama, Budapest Street Scene by Ervin Kálmán. By the time Memento Park reaches its conclusion, Matt’s narrative is as much about family history and father-son dynamics as it is about the nature of art itself, and the infinite ways we come to understand ourselves through it. Of all the questions asked by Mark Sarvas’s Memento Park—about family and identity, about art and history—a central, unanswerable predicament lingers: How do we move forward when the past looms unreasonably large?