Inheritance / Yerushe

This collection brings together for the first time in English the work of Peretz Markish, one of the most gifted and remarkable Jewish poets if the Soviet Union. Suffused with a consciousnes of suffering, homelessness, and inevitably the Holocaust, these moderist poems are meditative, elegiac, and prophetic in tone, and touch on the themes of loss, loneliness, displacement, war, and the yearning for renewal. Inextricably bound up with Markish's Eastern European Jewish identity, they are also intensely personal, modern, and universal. Bilingual edition - English/Yiddish.

Considered the "Jewish Byron" by many, Peretz Markish (1895-1952), was born in Volhynia, Ukraine, and went on to write forty works in Yiddish, twenty of which were translated into Russian. In 1921, in Warsaw, he formed the grup called The Gang, which struggled against realism in literature, and he coedited the expressionist Khaliastre Almanakh, which contained illustrations by Marc Chagall. His own poems expressed Jewish sorrow and hope. In 1926, he returned to the Soviet Union where he produced his best-known works, including those expressing Soviet patriotism and his sorrow at the extermination of the Jews. He was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1939, and executed in 1952, accused of Jewish nationalism.