The Zelmenyaners, Moyshe Kulback
The Zelmenyaners, Moyshe Kulback
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

The Zelmenyaners
A Family Saga

Author: Moyshe Kulback

Narrator: David Skulski

Unabridged: 9 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/01/2018

Categories: Fiction


Synopsis

This is the first complete English-language translation of “The Zelmenyaners” a classic of Yiddish literature, 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. The resultant intergenerational showdowns—including disputes over the introduction of electricity, radio, or electric trolley—are rendered with humor, pathos, and a finely controlled satiric pen. Moyshe Kulbak, a contemporary of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, picks up where Sholem Aleichem left off a generation before, exploring in this book the transformation of Jewish life.

Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937) was a leading Yiddish modernist poet, novelist, and dramatist. Arrested in 1937 during 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 at the age of 41.

Hillel Halkin, an acclaimed translator of Hebrew and Yiddish fiction, is the author, most recently, of Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel and Yehuda Halevi.

Sasha Senderovich is assistant professor of Russian studies and Jewish studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kavita on September 04, 2018

The Zelmenyaners are a Jewish family living in Minsk, and The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga is about their lives during the change to the Soviet era in Belarus, a part of the USSR. One of the few modern Yiddish novels to be translated into English, The Zelmenyaners is a humorous attempt to show how ha......more

Goodreads review by Kressel on November 30, 2015

I first heard of this book through Outwitting History; it is one of a select group of rescued Yiddish books that the Yiddish Book Center chose to translate into English, presumably because it offers such a rare glimpse into Jewish life in the early Soviet Union. Published as a serialized novel in th......more

3.5 stars This is an entertaining satire, an episodic novel featuring a Jewish extended family living in Minsk in the early 1930s, and published contemporaneously as a serial, though not translated to English until long after the fact. Four brothers, their wives, adult children, and various other rel......more

Goodreads review by Joyce on November 30, 2017

Actually, I listened to this on audio, but I can't easily find an ISBN to create a new record. And it may be an easier listen than read, as the narrator, David Skulski, has a lovely voice and makes a companionable narrator with distinct voices for the characters. It's a Yiddish classic, a family sag......more

Goodreads review by Mandy on October 23, 2013

I’d never heard of this little known classic of both Yiddish and Soviet literature, or of its author, in spite of my study of Russian literature, and am delighted to have now discovered it. This is the first complete English translation and I hope it now reaches a wide audience. Moyshe Kulbak (1896-......more