"[Halpern] was free of sentimentality and rich in irony, a virtuoso of form, politically engaged but not subservient to any ideology, the creator of half a dozen brilliant poetic personae and interlocutors, loved and known by Yiddish readers but never oversimplifying his poetry to win their praise.... His three books establish Halpern as a great poet: a Yiddish poet, a proletarian poet, an American poet, as broadly and intensely interesting a poet as Heine or Baudelaire or Frost. Yiddishists know this, of course. Some specialists and curious critics know it too—witness Harold Bloom's remark, that Halpern was a more impressive poet, in his experience as a reader, 'than any American-Jewish poet who has written in English.'" — From the introduction by Larry Rosenwald"With the Yiddish en face, Zlochov, My Home can be used to learn the lost mother tongue, because Halpern speaks in a diction so spare yet so idiomatic, wearing many masks and having traveled very far—from the Golden Land to the electric chair—as vagabond, poor immigrant, lover, parent, balladeer, elegist and prophet, that (believe it or not) another great poet, American-born, Richard Fein by name, mastered Yiddish if for no other reason than to produce a twenty-first-century Moyshe-Leyb." — David G. Roskies, author of Yiddishlands: A Memoir
