Translators Ellen Cassedy and Anita Norich join Lisa Newman to discuss their recently released translation of Rashel Veprinski’s Hand in Hand. This headily bittersweet novel takes readers into the “Jewish tumult” of New York’s early 20th-century Yiddish literary community, where recent immigrants from Eastern Europe toiled as shoemakers and tailors by day while cultivating a vibrant intelligentsia by night.

An indelible portrait of a milieu and a timeless mapping of desire and freedom, Hand in Hand lays bare the human heart in all its frailty, tenderness, and tyranny. As Kirkus Reviews notes, “An emotionally intense tale enlivened by unique literary history.”