SUNDAY, 4/19/2026, 3:00-5:00 PM PACIFIC "The nine stories in this volume take place primarily in Vilna, as well as various parts of Europe. As if presaging what was to come, World War I and Russian civil wars are the backdrops to these stories, as Jews and non-Jews find themselves under German occupation or caught up in the revolutionary fervor that promised them much and took away almost everything. The young women in Blankshteyn's stories insist on their independence, on eq

SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 2026 3:00-5:00 pm WITH SPECIAL GUEST TRANSLATOR JESSICA KIRZANE Subscribe to Yiddish Shmoozers (In Translation) to receive Zoom link Miriam Karpilove's novel, Diary of a Lonely Girl, portrays a secular Jewish immigrant woman's search for a love match on New York's Lower East Side. The unnamed narrator, a single and self-supporting worker without family in America, seeks a modern Jewish man to match her intellect and desires. The narrator wants a love match

Sunday June 29 4:00-6:00 PM Pacific Start Reading: Voices of the Matriarchs , by Chava Weissler (Boston: Beacon Press), Introduction and Chapters 3, 5, 9 Our recent reading of S. Y. Abramovitsh's work, Fishke the Lame, introduced us to the 19th century world of Mendele the Bookseller, who traveled from shtetl to shtetl selling religious books, miscellaneous ritual merchandise, and, importantly, booklets of prayers in Yiddish written for and sold to women. The Yiddish Shmoozer