In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, writer Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971) travelled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother. One of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, he used his journey as the basis for two highly autobiographical novellas (translated as "The Glatstein Chronicles") in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Glatstein's accounts 'stretch like a tightrope across a chasm', writes preeminent Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse in the Introduction. In Book One, "Homeward Bound", the narrator, Yash, recounts his voyage to his birthplace in Poland and the array of international travellers he meets along the way. Book Two, "Homecoming at Twilight", resumes after his mother's funeral and ends with Yash's impending return to the United States, a Jew with an American passport who recognizes the ominous history he is traversing. "The Glatstein Chronicles" is at once insightful reportage of the year after Hitler came to power, reflection by a leading intellectual on contemporary culture and events, and the closest thing we have to a memoir by the boy from Lublin, Poland, who became one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.

Jacob Glatstein arrived in America in 1914 and went on to publish twelve volumes of poetry, seven collections of essays and literary criticism, a wartime novel for teenagers, and the autobiographical novellas translated as The Glatstein Chronicles. Ruth Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. The late Norbert Guterman completed the first English translation of Book Two of The Glatstein Chronicles in 1962. Maier Deshell translated Book One. He is former editor of the Jewish Publication Society and translated (with Margaret Birstein) Yehoshua Perle's Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life, also for the New Yiddish Library.

"These are not works with conventional narratives; rather, they are exquisite poetic illuminations of Ashkenazic Jewry the moment before it was destroyed. . . . Highly recommended for all collections of Yiddish in translation."--Beth Dwoskin, "Association of Jewish Libraries"--Beth Dwoskin "Association of Jewish Libraries "