Overview

Available for the first time in translation, Mendel Mann's stories follow his life in reverse, from Israel in the 1950s to his experiences in the post-War Soviet Union and his childhood in Poland. With psychological insight and a focus on the tension between remembrance and reinvention, Mann provides indelible portraits of survivors as they confront the past and struggle to create a meaningful existence in the fledgling state of Israel. The early years of the State of Israel are usually associated with a precarious military situation, waves of immigrants, the idealistic kibbutz movement, and the atmosphere of a hard scrabble society trying to find its footing. But the country was also home to a new wave of Yiddish literature, often written by refugees who had arrived from Europe after the Holocaust. This is the setting of the opening stories in Seeds in the Desert.

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9780989373173

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Reviews

Kerner in midber: dertseylungen (1966), the volume of forty short stories written in the 1950s and early 1960, from which Valencia translated, is a fine choice to introduce Mann's writing to a wide audience in English, because this volume shows the range of his stories and experiences, as well as his unique narrative style. These stories take place in Israeli cities, towns, and villages, in the post-war Soviet Union, and in Poland of the interwar period. However, it is often very difficult to tell where the stories actually take place, because they express an experience of dislocation and total disorientation. Many of them begin with or contain sentences such as 'Did anyone from your family survive?' 'You must hear me out,' or 'I think I know you . . . we've met somewhere before', which indicate the urgency of telling the story as a way to deal with trauma, guilt, and despair. Some of these stories are told by a first-person narrator; others by an omniscient third-person narrator who relates the experiences of lonely, uprooted refugees. They are all extremely powerful, but in the context of the history of Yiddish literature, the most distinctive stories are those set in Israel. - Shachar Pinsker, In geveb

Author Information

Mendel Mann (1916- 1975) was born in Plonsk, Poland. When World War II broke out, Mann was forced to abandon his plan to study art in Warsaw and fled to the Chuvash Soviet Socialist Republic, where he worked as a teacher before enlisting in the Red Army. His War Trilogy, published between 1956 and 1960, evokes his wartime experiences. With his wife and small son he emigrated to Israel in 1948, and Mann became editorial secretary of Avrom Sutzkever's influential literary journal Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain). Mann's final homeland was France: in 1961 he moved to Paris to work for the Yiddish newspaper Undzer vort (Our Word). His literary work flourished there. Mendel Mann's poetry, novels, and short stories draw on his own turbulent life but also vividly reflect and contemplate the various troubled strands of Jewish life and fate in the twentieth century.

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