Description
At one time, the poems printed in this book were written by Jewish poets who lived in Russia and Ukraine and wrote in Yiddish. Once in Yiddish they spoke, wrote, sang, wrote their extraordinary stories to millions of people – until the Terrible War began, which ruined these millions of lives. And yet there were poets, they brought to us the echoes of a distant childhood, not yet knowing of the extermination of Jews – the Holocaust. We will have to say with great bitterness that almost all our poets have now passed another great trouble : Stalin’s repressions. Who went through prisons and camps, who – through exile, and Lev Kvitko and David Hofstein were simply killed … And yet even the saddest stories are destined to end – unlike, by the way, the poems, which live a long, long life, if these poems are bright and cheerful. But it was such poems – despite all the troubles and misfortunes – written by Jewish poets! Read about the funny characters itik Kipnis – Meishele and Moishe, or about the hapless Label, the hero of the poem Benjamin Gutyansky “Lepitsa-ridiculous”, but the glorious masters Eli and Shimen, about which so touchingly told Avram Gontar, or the nameless master-ceramist from the poems of Mikhail Mogilevich … If you read these verses carefully, you will surely hear in them echoes of folk poems and songs, the famous Jewish folklore, and it is recognized even in translation into another language. By the way, children’s Jewish poets in Russia have always been lucky to have translators – because they were translated by outstanding poets Samuel Marshak and Nikolai zabolotsky, Elena Blaginina and Sergey Mikhalkov, Heinrich Sapgir and Valentin Berestov, and how many wonderful poems have been translated recently by Vladimir Orlov and Ritali zaslavsky! The whole workshop of masters, now we are no less famous than the heroes-masters from our book. The book was published with the support of the Avi Hai Foundation.
