This pioneering study shows what brought Yiddish-speaking Jewish intelligentsia to the Communist movement in the interwar years. They believed that Communism is not only a way to solve the Jewish problem but also to save the Yiddish culture. Biography of the central protagonist of the book, a Yiddish writer Dovid (David) Sfard, is just a pretext to show a full range of Jewish Communist activists (such as Hersh Smolar, Bernard Mark, Szymon Zachariasz, etc.) and their life choices. This relatively small milieu influenced and controlled the Jewish life in post-war Poland until the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. Their lives, reconstructed thanks to sources in several languages, make up a panorama of Jewish Communist experience in 20th-century Eastern Europe.

This second edition of the award-winning Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary offers even more entries for anyone working with Yiddish on a personal or professional level. Based on the work of the late Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter, a noted linguist and Executive Director of the League for Yiddish, the dictionary emphasizes Yiddish as a living language that is spoken in many places around the world. Featuring 85,000 entries, this second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded with approximately 1000 new words and phrases and is sure to become a critical resource for Yiddish scholars and speakers for years to come.

Containing nearly 50,000 entries and 33,000 subentries, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary emphasizes Yiddish as a living language that is spoken in many places around the world. The late Mordkhe Schaechter collected and researched spoken and literary Yiddish in all its varieties and this landmark dictionary reflects his vision for present-day and future Yiddish usage. The richness of dialect differences and historical developments are noted in entries ranging from "agriculture" to "zoology" and include words and expressions that can be found in classic and contemporary literature, newspapers, and other sources of the written word and have long been used by professionals and tradesmen, in synagogues, at home, in intimate life, and wherever Yiddish-speaking Jews have lived and worked.