On the Waves of Destiny

Frieda Johles Forman was an author, translator, pioneer of feminist Jewish studies, who founded the Women’s Educational Resource Centre at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, and the award-winning editor of Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers.Sam Blatt is a Yiddish educator, translator, and editor, who has served as the coordinator of Yiddish teachers for adult education in the Toronto Jewish community.Judy Nisenholt is a Yiddish Book Center translation fellow with extensive experience translating Yiddish memoirs and letters.Vivian Felsen is an award-winning translator of French and Yiddish, whose published translations include books on Canadian Jewish history, Holocaust memoirs, and short stories.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionJewish Life in PolandWe Polish JewsNaftole Herts Kon: The Tragic EnthusiasmNotes and Reflections on the Fate of the Written WordThe Yiddish Folk Song in Polish TranslationHolocaustThe Hidden Source of a People’s Survival: Writings from the Ghettos and CampsOn the Nineteenth Birthday of Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum: Recollections and Summing UpJanusz Korczak: Pedagogue, ResearcherAnkeh: To Her Eternal MemoryThoughts on Reading "The Medem Sanatorium Book"Arts and LettersBruno Schulz: Artist and JewVasily Grossman: The History of a Book, or the Path to Jewish IdentityReyzl Zhikhlinski: On Her PoetryCzajkaCzajka: The Painful Path to Self DiscoveryBerl Mark, The Man and the Creator: On the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of His DeathMoyshe Shulshteyn: On His Tenth Yortsayt Fables, Short Stories, and Historic FictionAll Because of the Wife or The First QuarrelThe Rebbetzin’s Sense of JusticeWith Tevye the Dairyman in the UndergroundAnimals and HumansThe Jew Who Came LateThe Last NightUnfinished Pages: ExcerptThe Debate between Paper and Letters: A TaleEpilogueNotes on the Underground: Lili Berger’s Reflections on MarranismCultural Figures Named in the TextBiographies of Editors and TranslatorsBooks by Lily BergerBibliography

"This volume of Lili Berger’s translated work brings to life a literary world of pre- and post-World War II Polish Jewry with a particular emphasis on its Polishness. The essays in On the Waves of Destiny are often thick with poignant descriptions of the rich intellectual and social world in which Lili Berger lived and wrote, testifying to an unfinished world of education theory, political thought, and literary talent that was brutally cut short. Readers interested in Polish and Jewish literary, intellectual, and social history will find compelling sources in this book. This volume will fast take its place alongside Anastasia Lyubas’s recent volume of Dvora Vogel translations, Blooming Spaces, as an essential work of interwar Polish Yiddish writing in translation."