by Miriam Udel
Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature
Editor and translator, Miriam Udel. Foreword by Jack Zipes. With illustrations by Paula Cohen and original artists. NYU Press, 2020.
ISBN-10 : 1479874132
ISBN-13 : 978-1479874132
Imagine a rabbi who spends a sublime Sabbath in the desert hanging out with a friendly lion; a farm’s worth of chickens who want to study Yiddish; a girl so eager for a quiet place to read that she scales a Brooklyn streetlamp; and a charming mutt who helps his adoptive family stand up to police brutality and economic injustice. You’ll meet these characters and many more in the vibrant pages of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature, selected and translated by Miriam Udel, introduced by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, and illustrated by the late Paula Cohen.
This collection of almost fifty stories and poems offers the kinds of funny, charming, inspiring, edifying reading experiences that have sweetened learning for generations of Jewish children. Now they can be enjoyed by English-language readers from the early elementary years through adulthood and are ideal for intergenerational reading and discussion. Featuring many works appearing in English for the first time, by both prominent and lesser-known authors, this anthology spans the Yiddish-speaking globe—drawing from materials published in Eastern Europe, New York, and Latin America between the 1910s and the 1970s.
Recognized with the Judaica Reference Award from the Association for Jewish Libraries, Honey on the Page delivers original scholarship in an attractive volume enlivened by both black-and-white illustrations that appeared with the original Yiddish works and newly commissioned images by Paula Cohen. Arranged thematically, the sections range from stories about Jewish holidays and history, to folk literature and tales of foolishness with a specifically Yiddish flavor, to universalistic stories that channel an ethic of radical kindness through leftist politics. These long-neglected, orphaned works, whose natural readership was lost to genocide and linguistic assimilation, encapsulate a not-quite-lost civilization, one whose values endure in our spiritual and political lives and can enrich our contemporary conversation about how to be—and raise—a mensch.
LINKS & AWARDS
Purchase the book
Author’s website
2013 Yiddish Translation Fellowship
Association for Jewish Libraries Judaica Reference Award
Miriam Udel is associate professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. Her books include Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque and Honey on the Page. Her translation of Labzik: Tales of a Clever Pup (SUNY Press) will appear in Fall 2024 Press, as will her critical study Umbrella Sky: Children’s Literature and Modern Jewish Worldmaking (Princeton).
#YiddishLitMonth is curated by Madeleine Cohen. Mindl is academic director of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, where she directs the Yiddish translation fellowship and is translation editor of the Center’s online translation series. Mindl has a PhD in comparative literature from UC Berkeley. She is a visiting lecturer in Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College and president of the board of directors of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 