Hasidic Warsaw

Yechiel Hofer (1906-1972) was born in Warsaw to a Hasidic family, and was a close childhood friend of A.J. Heschel. He trained as a medical doctor, but devoted himself to writing stories, poetry and essays – first in Polish, and then in Yiddish. He was exiled to Siberia during World War II, and emigrated to Israel in 1951. Yitzhok Yanasovitsh praised Hofer’s 'abundance of descriptions of ways of life and…wealth of types and images which populated the Jewish street in Warsaw in the past'. Melech Ravitch described him as an 'exceptionally vivid author of novels, whose background was the Warsaw courtyard'. Hofer received the Itsik Manger Prize for outstanding contributions to Yiddish literature in 1971, the year before his death in Yafo, Israel.Jonathan Boyarin’s work centers on Jewish communities and on the dynamics of Jewish culture, memory, and identity. He has investigated these fields in a range of ethnographic projects set in Paris, Jerusalem, and the Lower East Side of New York City. Much of his work is in interdisciplinary critical theory, almost always from the perspective of modern Jewish politics and experience. He has extended these interests into comparative work on diaspora, the politics of time and space, and the ethnography of reading. His books include From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (with Jack Kugelmass, 1998, 2nd edition), Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Lower East Side Summer (2011), Jewish Families (2013), and Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (2020). Previous translations from Yiddish include A Fire Burns in Kotsk by Menashe Unger (2013).

• Introduction - Jonathan Boyarin, Cornell University, USAReb Zalmen by Yechiel Hofer (1960), Translated into English by Jonathan BoyarinNotesGlossaryBibliography

‘Boyarin’s translation—zesty, entertaining, and eloquent in equal measures—introducesEnglish readers to a remarkable tale by the noted author Yechiel Hofer. This text, amust-read for anyone interested in the religious cultures of Jewish Eastern Europe, invites us to step out of the present and into the thriving, complicated worlds of early twentieth-century Hasidism.’