As Long as We Are Not Alone: Selected Poems of Israel Emiot, translated by Leah Zazulyer

"If a great poet, as Randall Jarrell once suggested, is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning a couple of times, then Israel Emiot is certainly one of the great poets of the 20th Century."

-Ilya Kaminsky

ISBN 978-0986044557

2015

$16.95

BILINGUAL EDITION

ISRAEL EMIOT was born in Ostrov-Mazoviecka, near Warsaw, in 1909, and died in Rochester, New York, in 1978. Yiddish was his native as well as his writing language. His peripatetic life was emblematic of Jewish writers in the 20th century. After a very religious upbringing, geared toward his becoming a rabbi, and an arranged marriage, he gravitated to the distinguished, enlightened , and more secular Warsaw Literary Circle, Tlomatka 13. In 1939, he fled to Bialystok in the Soviet Russia when the Germans invaded Poland at the start of World War II. There followed a typical required work battalion in Kazakhstan, a period in Moscow, and a subsequent assignment as a journalist in Birobidjhan. The latter was followed by seven years of a ten year sentence in a Stalin era hard labor camp during a time of renewed Soviet atrocities against Jews. After his release he eventually returned to Poland for rehabilitation, and then spent his last twenty years in the USA, where the wife and two children he had lost track of during the war now lived. His poetry includes sonnets, historical monologues, triolets, and very contemporary free verse. It contains a variety of themes: of landscape, tradition, nostalgia, family, current events, love, and alienation. Emiot maintained contact with other important Yiddish writers worldwide, and participated in the far-flung modernization movements in Yiddish literature.

LEAH ZAZULYER wrote poetry and prose, translated Yiddish poetry, and was a retired special education teacher, consultant, school psychologist, and mediator. She received grants from the Constance Saltonstall Arts Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York State Foundation on the Arts, and the Winston Translation Award from the Yiddish Book Center. In 2017, FootHills Publishing publish her collection Alone As a Stone; also in fall 2017, her chapbook Escenas/Scenes was published by Palettes and Quills. She died in 2022.