 | The Zelmenyaners Subjects: Jewish families -- Belarus -- Minsk -- Fiction; Jews -- Belarus -- Minsk -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Minsk (Belarus) -- Fiction; Soviet Union -- History -- 1917–1936 -- Fiction; Acclaimed translator Hillel Halkin offers the first English translation of a classic of Yiddish literature, considered one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality. Four generations are depicted in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the profound changes brought on by the demands of the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism. #160; Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was a Yiddish poet, novelist, and dramatist. The Zelmenyaners was written and published in Minsk between 1929 and 1935, the heyday of short-lived cultural renaissance. Arrested in 1937 in the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence, and given a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot on October 29 at the age of 41. Hillel Halkin is the New York Times bestselling author of Letters to an American-Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic and Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel. |
