דרייַ לידער

Itzik Manger was the most popular Yiddish poet of the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in Czernovits, in the Hapsburg Empire, in 1899, lived in Warsaw in the twenties and thirties, and moved to Paris in 1938. He escaped Paris before the Germans came and made his way to England by way of Marseilles and North Africa. He moved to New York after the war, and died in Israel in 1968. He wrote mostly in traditional verse forms and was a master of rhyme and meter.

Murray Citron is a grandfather and lives in Ottawa. He spoke Yiddish and English interchangeably as a child, but lost the Yiddish when he went to school. More recently, while thumbing through The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, he came on Itzik Manger’s poetry and has been recovering his Yiddish to read the poems. His translations of Itzik Manger and other Yiddish poets have appeared in print and online in England, Canada, and the United States, including in Pakn Treger, the magazine of the Yiddish Book Center.

Lawrence Rosenwald is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he has been teaching since 1980. He has published critical and scholarly writing about diaries, translation, words and music, literary multilingualism, nonviolence and literature, and translations from Latin, Italian, German, French, and Yiddish. He has also written and performed some sixty verse scripts for early music theater, for such ensembles and organizations as the Amherst Early Music Festival, ARTEK, Voices of Music, and the Texas Early Music Project. His most recent book is War No More, an anthology of American anti-war and peace writing for the Library of America, and his current large project is called “Towards a Pacifist Criticism.” Rosenwald has served as a mentor for the Yiddish Book Center’s Translation Fellowship and his translations have appeared in Pakn Treger, the magazine of the Yiddish Book Center.