Mission

The mission of Naydus Press is to increase awareness of and access to Yiddish literature by supporting Yiddish translators and publishing their translations into English. While on the eve of the Second World War some 10 million Jews employed Yiddish as their mother tongue, today a tiny and dwindling fraction can make that claim. Of the thousands of works of Yiddish poetry, prose, and drama produced or published in the literature’s millennium-long history a generous estimate is that a scant 2% have been translated at all. Naydus Press steps into this void to publish first-rate translations in high-quality editions. As a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization, our goal is to bring the best of Yiddish literature to new generations of readers.

People

Staff

Jordan Finkin, Publisher and Editor

Editorial Board

Allison Schachter, Professor of Jewish Studies and English, Vanderbilt University
Kathryn Hellerstein, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania
Sebastian Schulman, Executive Director, KlezKanada

Colophon

Naydus Press is named in honor of the gifted Yiddish poet Leyb Naydus (1890-1918). His playful and charming lyrics introduced forms seldom if ever attempted in Yiddish. He elevated Yiddish rhyme and employed a rich vocabulary drawn from a variety of different languages, offering a remarkable cosmopolitan vision for Yiddish literature on the world stage. Naydus Press salutes that vision in selecting works from the Yiddish World — that is, from Yiddish culture and the literary traditions with which it was in conversation. The colophon is taken from Naydus’s own self-sketch as a Grecian youth, flanked by his initials.