Vilna My Vilna: Stories by Abraham Karpinowitz
Translated from the Yiddish by Helen Mintz
Foreword by Justin Cammy.
Syracuse University Press,
Syracuse, New York.
"Thanks to this wonderful volume, expertly translated by Helen Mintz, Abraham Karpinowitz will finally get the attention he deserves. His stories are funny, well-crafted and suffused with the special atmosphere of Jewish Vilna." – Samuel D. Kassow, Northam Professor of History, Trinity College.
“Karpinowitz is a master storyteller with a talent for blending fact and fiction, an eye for detail, a finely attuned ear for slang – and an abiding affection for the colorful characters who inhabit the lost world of prewar Vilna... It’s all brilliantly rendered in this first-ever translation.” – Ellen Cassedy, author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust.
“Criminals, dreamers and performers . . . make their way through Karpinowitz’s pages in pungent, unforgettable characterizations. – Jeremy Dauber, Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, Columbia University.
“Vilna My Vilna, a remarkable book of Yiddish short stories by Abraham Karpinowitz (1913–2004), has now been translated into English by Helen Mintz. This collection demonstrates that Karpinowitz deserves to be counted among the great Yiddish writers. . . Translator Helen Mintz captures the distinct Vilna Yiddish through a colloquial and vivid English. Karpinowitz’s metaphors are well preserved: “Libke lay next to him, her pointy belly covered with a cotton blanket like a cholent waiting for tardy guests”; “A tavern has open eyes.” – Peninnah Schram, Jewish Book Council
“In longing and loss, through the mouths of those he wished might still speak, Abraham Karpinowitz offers a salutation of the heart to his beloved Vilna.” – Joann Green Breuer, the Arts Fuse
“It is a master storyteller who can make you feel like you’ve met someone you never knew, visited a city to which you’ve never been, make you long for a people, place and culture you’ve never experienced but from a generation, location and language once, twice or thrice removed. Abraham Karpinowitz (1913-2004) is such a writer. And, thanks to local master storyteller and translator Helen Mintz, more of us can now visit Karpinowitz’s Vilna – a city full of colorful characters, both real and not, and share in a small part of their lives.” – Cynthia Ramsay, The Jewish Independent
Yiddish writer Abraham Karpinowitz portrays the dreams and struggles of poor and disenfranchised Jews from his native city of Vilna (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) during the period immediately before the Holocaust. His stories provide an affectionate portrait of fishwives and cobblers, thieves and prostitutes. This collection also includes two intimate memoirs of the author’s childhood experiences in his father’s Vilna Yiddish theatre. Mintz deftly preserves Karpinowitz’s colorful, often idiomatic Yiddish, capturing his unique voice and bringing this destroyed world to English-language readers
Abraham Karpinowitz wrote seven books of short stories, two biographies, and a play. His work has been translated into German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian He won the esteemed Manger Prize in 1981.