Hand in Hand

Ellen Cassedy is a Yiddish translator with a special interest in women writers. Her translations include On the Landing: Stories by Yenta Mash (2018) and Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel (with co-translator Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, 2016). She is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (2012) and Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie (2022). Her awards include the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction and the Leviant Memorial Prize from the Modern Language Association. She lives in New York City and has a website at www.ellencassedy.com. Anita Norich, Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, is the translator of Desires by Tsilye Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), and numerous short stories, among them twenty previously untranslated stories by Israel Joshua Singer (in the three-volume Collected Works of I. J. Singer, published by Koren Press). She is the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century (2013); Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust (2007); and The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (1991). Rashel Veprinski was born in the town of Ivankov, near Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1893. In 1907, after the death of her father, she and her mother and siblings moved to New York City, where she began working in a sweatshop at the age of 13. She attended night school and read work by Yiddish-American poets. In 1918 she published her first poem, in the Yiddish journal Di naye velt (The New World), and then published poetry, fiction, and articles in numerous Yiddish magazines and journals. Her books include Ruf fun fligl (Call of Wings; 1926), Di palitre, lider (The Palette, Poems) and Lider (Poems) (both in 1964), Tsum eyntsikn shtern (To the Single Star; 1971), Dos kreytsn fun di hent (Hand in Hand; 1971), and Nakhtfayern (Night Fires; 1978). After the death of the poet Mani Leyb-- her lover for more than three decades-- she compiled his literary oeuvre in Lider un baladn (Poems and Ballads; 1955) and published a collection of his Yiddish-language letters to her (Briv. -- 1918- 1953: Mani Leyb tsu Rashel V.eprinsk.i; 1980). She died in New York in 1981.