May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974). In "Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his shtetl Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the industrial city of Lodz and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to English-language readers for the first time.

May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974). In "Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his shtetl Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the industrial city of Lodz and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to English-language readers for the first time.

Prayers of a Heretic explores the "crime" of heresy and the condition of existential displacement through the language of prayer and prayerful voice/s. In the first section, "Visits and Visitations," the poet imagines a variety of protoganists in situations of supplication. The second section, "In the Gleaning," examines the life, trangressions, and prayers of the title character and the primacy of books, libraries, and reading for refuge and reconfiguration. Eschewing a secular/religious divide, the book offers an expansive interpretation of the enduring power of prayer. Four poems also have a Yiddish version.

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Taub is a master of the character study. His poems are crowded with portraits, novels in miniature, of the old, the overlooked, the dispossessed. Here you will find Aunt Milkah Pesl, taciturn and unsentimental, the volunteer in assisted living who reads books in Yiddish, the patient in an MRI scanner listening to "a symphony of terror" like "John Zorn on Quaaludes." There are the regulars in a library, and the treasures found hidden in the pages of old books. There are lonely men in search of "fleshly glory." And over-arching all, there are repentance and atonement, constantly remade anew.
--Kim Roberts, author of Pearl Poetry Prize-winning Animal Magnetism

This book is a feast: sensuous, ironic, political, hilarious, poignant and wise. Intimately Jewish yet embracing of all, its cast of characters includes aged professors, flirtatious landladies, poem-peddlers and the Pied Piper. In "Credo," a stunning poem near the book's end, Taub powerfully defines religion on his own terms, with equal measures of awe, horror and gratitude at the world.
--Ruth L. Schwartz, author of Edgewater

Whether he's writing in English or Yiddish, in poetry or prayer, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub has a firm grasp on the language of the heart. His characters, men (including one named Yermiyahu) and women whose only crimes are that they are human, are as familiar as our own reflections. In Taub's skilled and attentive hands, no judgments are passed; heresy is in the eye of the beholder.
--Gregg Shapiro, author of GREGG SHAPIRO: 77 and Protection

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub's new collection of poems is rich with intimacy and longing, culled from the dual influences of both contemporary gay culture and timeless Jewish tradition. The speakers in Taub's poems find themselves squarely displaced between these two extremes, between the obligation to duty and the surrender to pleasure, the lightness of daily foibles and the darkness of long-held secrets and shame. The poems-bold, unfettered-are draped around the reader like "a necklace of whispers"-as objects both of beauty and of restraint. Taub is a poet in whose hands I feel moved and informed, comforted and implored. Charles Jensen
Author of The First Risk

This book is a dazzler for any of us who live between cultures and find it hard to negotiate between absolute identities. In poems more urgent than well-mannered, Taub cuts to the bone again and again, making lyrical incisions through history, memory and myth in a spirit of comic melancholy and lament. "Rosa, Rosa, how did it come to this?" he asks, as if speaking for all of us who have emerged from the last century complicated, thinking and feeling too much. Here is a mind embodied enough to imagine the resiliency of "a foreskin ... spontaneously sprouted " Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Author of The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life

Uncle Feygele is a funny, insightful, and amazingly humane collection of poems. While the poems cleverly connect the seemingly disparate identities of being openly queer and an Orthodox Jew, they also manage something much bigger-illuminating the tiny struggles and tricks of memory that are a part of all human experience. T. Cole Rachel
Author of Surviving the Moment of Impact

Switching back and forth from English to Yiddish, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub's poetry is at once socially engaged and sexy. The collection as a whole, which includes poems in honor of the social democrat Rosa Luxemburg and the Hebrew poet Rahel, and the "unnamed and unremembered," is beautifully crafted. His poems on men ... sizzling. David Shneer
Author of Through Soviet Jewish Eyes:
Photography, War, and the Holocaust

Poetry. Inspired by the poet's experience as an artist's model, WHAT STILLNESS ILLUMINATED is a kaleidoscope of mysterious tableaux vivants. Composed entirely of five-line poems, the book offers glimpses of individuals in moments of flux or revelation and suggestions of lives altered. "As if in a dream, here a richly imagined film is made still, its images and sounds slowed to a halt so that we can appreciate all of the different strands and their relation to each other. With these distillations Taub sheds new light on the dramatic potential of all of these languages, showing us what comes when they are seen, read, or heard next to each other"--Laura Levitt, author of American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust.