From a Bird's Cage to a Thin Branch: The Selected Poems of Yosef Kerler

Translated by Maia Evrona

The first Yiddish/English bilingual edition of one of Yiddish literature’s most vital post-war poets. Born in the Ukrainian town of Haysin and raised in Crimea, Yosef Kerler was perhaps the only Yiddish poet to publish poetry written in the gulag. He would later become one of the first prominent refuseniks. This collection proves strikingly timely, with the poet’s complicated relationship to his “cradle-land” echoing throughout, in poems of Ukrainian forests and folk heroes, of the Vorkuta Gulag and Babi Yar.