Yiddish Book Center / White Goat Press
November 2019
ISBN 9780989373197
$14.95 US
pp 174
Yiddish Book Center / White Goat Press 2019
Nomberg's stories explore modern Jewish life in the growing cosmopolitan city of Warsaw: young intellectuals in pursuit of truth, beauty, and love; working class fathers tempted by schemes for easy money; teenagers divided between their traditional religious upbringings and the world of secular culture and political revolution. By turns comic, satiric, and earnest, Nomberg's stories take the pulse of Warsaw's Jewish society at the dawn of the twentieth century.
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What people are saying:
“Nomberg never wrote a sentence that didn’t contain the seeds of an idea.”
— Froyim Kaganovski
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“Tinged with the deeply hopeless, yet nervously optimistic perspective of pre-WWII Jewish intellectuals, the stories of Hersh Dovid Nomberg evoke the lost world of Jewish luftmentsh autodidacts floating between urban cultures while in the process of creating their own. Daniel Kennedy’s sharp translation shows us a rich Yiddish landscape riddled with young Jews deep in intellectual ferment, culturally unmoored but with a curiosity for life that swells hearts."
— Eddy Portnoy, author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Tales from the Yiddish Press
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“Hilarious and insightful, a glimpse of a vanished world seen close at hand, with poverty, propriety, romance and much more. Nomberg was a forgotten genius, forgotten until . . . now! A very fine translation, too!"
— Paul Buhle, author of Marxism in the United States
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"Poignant, unsettling, and deeply moving."
— Donald Weber, Jewish Book Council