Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912–1974). In "Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his shtetl Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the industrial city of Lódz and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to English-language readers for the first time.

May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912–1974). In "Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his shtetl Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the industrial city of Lódz and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to English-language readers for the first time.

The Education of a Daffodil is an extended reflection on violence on a small scale and its legacies. In the first section, "Brief Histories of Fear," the poet constructs an atmosphere of foreboding and danger. This is a sequence of discrete narrative and portrait poems highlighting protagonists in a variety of historical and contemporary settings in moments of crisis and/or introspection. Crafted in sometimes ornate language, this section presents the conjured kindred spirits that have shaped the title character and evokes some of his principal literary influences and moods. In the second section, "Life Studies in Yellow and Other Primary Colors," the lens is narrowed, and the poems are interconnected. Here, the effeminate eponymous hero moves from a state of innocence, or rather unknowing, through the crucible of brutality, into ultimately a state approaching equilibrium. Taken together, the book can be read as a Bildungsroman in free verse and a chronicle of tenacity and endurance. Six poems also have a Yiddish version.