Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories

"[These] stories give English readers an unprecedented opportunity to delve into a substantial body of prose by Blume Lempel, an important voice in post?World War II Yiddish letters." ?Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture

This finally makes accessible to a wider audience . . . [Lempel's] stories about the erotic and intellectual life of (mostly) women and men, their psychological and historical motivations, the horror of the Holocaust and the desire to renew life even as one mourns." ?Anita Norich, Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the 20th Century

This is the first English-language collection of the best stories by Blume Lempel (1907?1999). While many of her stories opened a window on the Old World and the Holocaust, she also wrote about the margins of society, about subjects considered untouchable, among them abortion, prostitution, women's erotic imaginings, and even incest. She illuminated the inner lives of her characters?mostly women. Her storylines migrate between past and present, Old World and New, dream and reality, modern-day New York and prewar Poland, bedtime story and passionate romance, and old-age dementia and girlhood dreams.

Immigrating to New York when Hitler rose to power, Blume Lempel began publishing her short stories in 1945. By the 1970s her work had become known throughout the Yiddish literary world. When she died in 1999, the Yiddish paper Forverts wrote: "Yiddish literature has lost one of its most remarkable women writers."

Ellen Cassedy is author of the award-winning study We Are Here, about the Lithuanian Holocaust. With her colleague Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, they received the Yiddish Book Center 2012 Translation Prize for translating Blume Lempel.

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of several books of poetry, including Prayers of a Heretic/Tfiles fun an apikoyres (2013), Uncle Feygele (2011), and What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn (2008).