Description: A unique depiction - part ethnography, part memoir, part novel - of the Polish Hasidic world on the eve of the First World War.
Brief description: Yechiel Hofer (1906-1972) was born in Warsaw to a Hasidic family, and was a close childhood friend of A.J. Heschel. He trained as a medical doctor, but devoted himself to writing stories, poetry and essays - first in Polish, and then in Yiddish. He was exiled to Siberia during World War II, and emigrated to Israel in 1951. Yitzhok Yanasovitsh praised Hofer's 'abundance of descriptions of ways of life and...wealth of types and images which populated the Jewish street in Warsaw in the past'. Melech Ravitch described him as an 'exceptionally vivid author of novels, whose background was the Warsaw courtyard'. Hofer received the Itsik Manger Prize for outstanding contributions to Yiddish literature in 1971, the year before his death in Yafo, Israel.
Review Quotes:
"Boyarin's translation-zesty, entertaining, and eloquent in equal measures-introduces
English readers to a remarkable tale by the noted author Yechiel Hofer. This text, a
must-read for anyone interested in the religious cultures of Jewish Eastern Europe, invites
us to step out of the present and into the thriving, complicated worlds of early twentieth-
century Hasidism." --Ariel Evan Mayse, author of Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (2024)
Boyarin brings to us a captivating example of Yiddish literature in his masterful English
translation and a rich historical source on a little-known aspect of the religious life of
Eastern European Jews. Beware! Once you start reading, you might not be able to put it
down!" --Marcin Wodzinski, author of Hasidism: Key Questions (2018)