This novel by the best-known Yiddish writer is about a prodigy cantor named Yosele Solovey (“Yosele” is the Yiddish equivalent of “Joe”; “Solovey” means “nightingale”) whose professional success quickly leads him to personal ruin.

A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward, ed. Isaac Metzger (New York: Schocken Books, 1990).

Published in book form in English translation, this volume is a collection of letters first printed at the turn of the last century in the advice column of the most popular American Yiddish newspaper. Written by people desperate for help in their new country, the letters reveal the particular problems Jewish immigrants faced in their new home—as well as many problems that never grow old.

S. Y. Agnon, A Guest for the Night (1939)

English translation available, trans. Misha Louvich (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).

This Hebrew novel, written by a Nobel laureate, describes a visit to a devastated Jewish town in Poland fifteen years after World War I. In one scene, a wounded Jewish veteran recalls being in a trench during a battle and seeing an arm wrapped in tefillin, severed from its body.

Hayyim Nachman Bialik, Random Harvest (1923)

English translation available in Random Harvest: The Novellas of Bialik, trans. David Patterson and Ezra Spicehandler (Boulder, Colo.: West-view Press, 1999).

This autobiographical novel by the most acclaimed modern Hebrew poet describes the life of an orphaned Jewish boy in rural Ukraine. In one scene, the narrator recounts how wolves occasionally entered his village.

H. Leivick, The Wolf (1920)

English translation available in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

This long poem by an American Yiddish poet describes the destruction of an Eastern European Jewish town during World War I. A rabbi, the sole survivor of a massacre of the town’s Jews, escapes to the woods, where he is transformed into a wolf.

Yankev Glatshteyn, “The Crown” (1956)

This American Yiddish modernist master published many volumes of poetry. His collection Fun Mayn Gantser Mi (“From All My Toil”) contains the following poem:

The Crown

This song in my voice that chants, with proper cantillation,

the melody of memory, the haunting humming,

this crown, shot through with silver, that you see on my head,

where did it come from?

Where?

With a wild prank,

with boyish will,

some forty years ago,

through a portal of the ship,

I sent my tefillin out on the waters.

Like cast-off bread, the tefillin’s crown came back.

After many years, the soaked crown swam back.

A silver crown.

Like an unhatched egg,

God’s sorrow lay before my father’s threshold,

when, with a heavy heart, a half-dried wineskin,

I set out on the roads.

Severed, forlorn and tattered,

I began my wandering

through the terrifying wilderness of our century.

O, forty thorns of my century.

A God-seeker, I tapped blindly with my staff

and skillfully avoided the quorum in the synagogue.