Stories of Exile Reading Group - NEW

"The Glatstein Chronicles" by Jacob Glatstein

This is a free Adult School class. Click on the ticketing link to register.

Join our 4-part series to read and discuss newly available tales of migration, memory, identity, and transformation with MPL librarian Ariel Zeitlin. Check out our Stories of Exile Series webpage to register for related special events with a photographer, a free filmscreening, and a play reading. Funded by a grant from the Yiddish Book Center. All the programs are free but registration is required. Free copies of books available while supplies last. Click here for the eBook on hoopla. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

We recommend that you read all of "The Glatstein Chronicles," but we'll focus on Book One.

A notable Yiddish-American man of letters is journeying home to Lublin to his mother's deathbed in 1934 when he hears about Hitler's infamous "Night of the Long Knives." He seeks out other Jews on the ship to discuss the news, with surprising results.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971) was Polish-born poet and literary critic who in 1920 helped establish the Inzikhist (“Introspectivist”) literary movement. In later years he was one of the outstanding figures in mid-20th-century American Yiddish literature.

Glatstein immigrated to the United States in 1914 and studied law at New York University. In 1920 he co-published “Introspektivizm,” the manifesto of the literary group In Zikh (“In Oneself” or “Introspection”). In the 1920s Glatstein edited and wrote for In zikh, the modernist journal of the Inzikhist poets, who, influenced by psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious and by stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, celebrated personal experience in free and naturalist verse. From 1938 Glatstein turned increasingly to elegiac poetry mourning the destruction of traditional Jewish life in eastern Europe. Glatstein also was a columnist and critic for the New York Yiddish daily newspaper Der Morgnzhurnal (“Morning Journal”) and the weekly Yiddisher kemfer (“Jewish Fighter”).

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