Dara Horn

Meir Blinkin’s sordid and sometimes mystical tales of extramarital sex made him the brightest star of ‘di yunge’ before his untimely death at 35

Polish author Szczepan Twardoch’s newly translated gangster novel is a non-Jew’s view of the total absence of Jews—and the haunting effects of that absence on present-day Poland

Virginity and free love in the immigrant world of tenements, in Miriam Karpilove’s newly translated, unselfconsciously Jewish, and hugely popular Yiddish novel ‘Diary of a Lonely Girl’

Was Isaac Bashevis’ older brother Israel Joshua Singer the better novelist?

Self-mutilation as a Jewish cultural strategy and the sad history of the Yevsektsiya

A dispatch from frozen Harbin, where Jews once flourished—and melted away

A 1920s epic poem about fear, and Jewish vulnerability, that could have been about 1944—or 2018

Stalin-victim Dovid Bergelson’s ‘The End of Everything’ is about the demise of Eastern European Jewish life

Yiddish writer Itzik Manger’s ‘relentlessly delightful’ biblical fantasia ‘The Book of Paradise’ refuses to be taken to the bitter edge

Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb brought cruel death in the Lodz ghetto to life

The best Yiddish story ever written about a pogrom is by Lamed Shapiro, the early 20th-century American Yiddish writer who wanted the Jews to get woke

An enduring and strange epic poem about life in America in the early 20th century—for many Jewish immigrants, a true Promised Land

The café as ‘safe space’ in interwar Vienna, in David Fogel’s Hebrew classic, ‘Married Life’

Jacob Glatstein’s 1930s Yiddish novel ‘Homecoming at Twilight’ foresaw the coming doom

Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever’s 1936 work ‘Siberia’ magically upends a litany of misery for him and his people