Piotr Wróbel

Anna Clarke

Yeḥiel Yeshaia Trunk

" Orignally published between 1946 and 1953, Poyln (Poland) is one of the treasures of Yiddish literature. Despite its reputation, the book has not been fully translated into English until now. Written by Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk, a prominent Polish Jewish writer, Poyln is a colorful epic, a moving testimony, and an important primary historical source that presents a portrait of Polish Jewry against the backdrop of the Nazi genocide. The undisputed hero of the story is the national community of Polish Jews. To portray this community, Trunk creates a rich gallery of characters – Hassidic patricians, timber merchants, rich landowners, brilliant Talmudists, Orthodox rabbis, and Hasidic tsadikim. He also depicts ordinary village and small-town Jews, artisans, shopkeepers, workers, and Luftmenschen, all of them members of one extended family. Particularly valuable aspects of Poyln are its examination of different trends in the Hasidic movement and the author's attempt to bridge the gap between his secular generation and its religious ancestors. In short, Trunk's work aims to show Jewishness as a way of life. This is the first instalment of a multi-volume edition of Poyln, the first English translation to be published. Here begins a story of the beauty and pathos of the world of Polish Jewry, a world that was almost totally destroyed by the Nazis. "

My Life Within Jewish Life in Poland : Sketches and Images

Poyln

Isaiah Trunk

In his comprehensive examination of the Lódz Ghetto, originally published in Yiddish in 1962, historian Isaiah Trunk sought to describe and explain the tragedy that befell the Jews imprisoned in the first major ghetto imposed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in 1939. Lódz had been home to nearly a quarter million Jews. When the Soviet military arrived in January 1945, they found 877 living Jews and the remains of a vast industrial enterprise that had employed masses of enslaved Jewish laborers. Based on an exhaustive study of primary sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, and Russian, Isaiah Trunk, a former resident of Lódz, reconstructs the organization of the ghetto and discusses its provisioning; forced labor; diseases and mortality; crime and deportations; living conditions; political, social, and cultural life; and resistance. Included are translations of the 141 documents that Trunk reproduced in his volume.

Yeḥiel Yeshaia Trunk

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