Re: ‘A good book truly is important’

To the editor,

Obviously, fiction books have the widest readership, but many memoirs, historical accounts, and autobiographical novels also have an appeal. By and large, books of that nature that were written in Yiddish gather dust on the shelf and are lost to oblivion. I’ve translated four into English that interested me. Three can be read free of charge on the website of the publisher, openbookpublishers.com: Bernard Weinstein, The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories; Nokhem Shtif’s Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-1919 (Prelude to the Holocaust); and Mendl Mann’s The Fall of Berlin. The fourth, Yitzkhak Erlichson’s My Four Years in Soviet Russia, is available from the New York Public Library and a few local university libraries.

Good reading.

MAURICE WOLFTHAL