Proletpen: America's rebel Yiddish poets

This unique anthology translates for the first time a little-known body of Yiddish poetry by American Yiddish proletarian writers who identified politically and poetically with the American Left from the 1920s to the early 1950s. In his introduction, Dovid Katz explains how a McCarthy-era "American Yiddish Political Correctness" wrote these leftist poets out of the canon. Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub correct this erasure, recovering the work of thirty poets. Proletpen introduces the reader to an untold chapter of American's tumultuous history during the pre- and inter-war period, revealing the depth and power of Yiddish literature through the backdrop of twentieth-century world politics.

Winner, CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Titles, Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

Winner, 2006 Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize of the Modern Language Association

“A window into the lives of a group of socialist writers who spoke passionately about everything from racism to the plight of the worker and the grinding poverty they confronted on a daily basis.”—Jewish Book Council