Book details

Genre:biography & autobiography
Sub-genre:Personal Memoirs
Language:English
Pages:194
eBook ISBN:9798998779800

Hand in Hand: An Autobiographical Novel

Name: Hand in Hand: An Autobiographical Novel
Price: 7.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Rashel Veprinski

By Rashel Veprinski

Overview

New York, 1918. One fateful winter night, Miriam Eidelberg finds herself strolling across the Williamsburg Bridge with her literary hero, the man whose poems she knows by heart. Nyezhiner, a star of his Yiddish artistic clique, is beguiled by the wistful girl at his side. But Miriam is married with a young daughter, while Nyezhiner, who is ten years her senior, has a wife, five children, and a womanizing reputation. Can these lovers find in each other the fulfillment they yearn for—and at what cost? An indelible portrait of a milieu and a timeless mapping of desire and freedom, Hand in Hand lays bare the human heart in all its frailty, tenderness, and tyranny.

Description

From this prolific poet, author, and labor movement activist, a headily bittersweet love story set among the young Jewish literati of World War I–era New York City. One fateful winter night, Miriam Eidelberg finds herself strolling across the Williamsburg Bridge with her literary hero, the man whose poems she knows by heart. Nyezhiner, a star of the Yiddish artistic clique Di yunge—"the young ones"—is beguiled by the wistful girl at his side. But Miriam is married with a young daughter, while Nyezhiner, who is ten years her senior, has a wife, five children, and a womanizing reputation. Can these lovers find in each other the fulfillment they yearn for—and at what cost? An indelible portrait of a fascinating milieu and a timeless inquiry into desire, freedom, and the wrenching compromises life demands, Hand in Hand shows an author at the height of her powers as a poet of the human heart.

About The Author

Rashel Veprinski was born in the town of Ivankov, near Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1895. In 1907, after the death of her father, she and her mother and siblings moved to New York City, where she began working in a sweatshop at the age of 13. She attended night school and read work by Yiddish-American poets. In 1918 she published her first poem in the Yiddish journal Di naye velt (The New World), and then published poetry, fiction, and articles in numerous Yiddish magazines and journals. Her books include Ruf fun fligl (Call of Wings; 1926), Di palitre, lider (The Palette, Poems) and Lider (Poems) (both in 1964), Tsum eyntsikn shtern (To the Single Star; 1971), Dos kreytsn fun di hent (Hand in Hand; 1971), and Nakhtfayern (Night Fires; 1978). After the death of the poet Mani Leyb—her lover for more than three decades—she compiled his literary oeuvre in Lider un baladn (Poems and Ballads; 1955) and published a collection of his Yiddish-language letters to her (Briv, 1918–1953: Mani Leyb tsu Rashel Veprinski; 1980). She died in New York in 1981.