East Broadway to Whitechapel

A collection of beautifully evocative short stories by dovid katz translated from yiddish by Barnett Zumoff

‘Yiddish Literature is one of the world’s great literatures, in both quantity and quality. Its greatest figures, such as Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer are dead, and the tendency is to describe Yiddish literature in the past tense. 

‘However, a significant number of Yiddish writers are still producing first-rate literature today. One of them, Dovid Katz. I have put together a selection of his most interesting stories about contemporary Jewish life in the West. I hope that reading these stories will whet the reader’s appetite for more of Dovid Katz’s beautifully evocative tales.’

Barnett Zumoff

About the author

DOVID KATZ, a native of Boro Park, Brooklyn, grew up steeped in the Yiddish of his father, Yiddish and English poet Menke Katz. After studying in Brooklyn yeshivas, he majored in linguistics (specialty: Yiddish) at Columbia University, relocating to London to write his doctorate on the origins of Yiddish. He established and for eighteen years led Yiddish studies at Oxford. After a stint at Yale, he settled in Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania where he established Yiddish studies at Vilnius University. He has written prolifically on the history of Yiddish and has published four collections of original Yiddish short stories. He is at work on the Yiddish Cultural Dictionary (YCD). He is also a scholar and active opponent of the new East European Holocaust revisionism and edits the web journal Defending History. He divides the year between Vilnius, Lithuania and the mountains of North Wales.