Yiddish Book Club

The Renner Frankford Public Library is pleased to share that we have been accepted into the Yiddish Book Center’s 2025–26 Public Libraries Program: Between Two Worlds: Exploring Jewish Culture and Religion through Yiddish Literature. Between Two Worlds focuses on engaging people with Yiddish literature and Jewish life, religion, and culture, and fostering vibrant cross-cultural dialogue and discussion in their communities. As part of this program, we will be hosting 4 book club events.

This edition of the Yiddish Book Club will discuss The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak. The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk under the new Soviet regime. The book depicts four generations in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the changes brought on by the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism. The resultant intergenerational showdowns– including disputes over the introduction of electricity, radio, and electric trolley– are rendered with humor, pathos, and a finely controlled satiric pen. Moyshe Kulbak, a contemporary of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, picks up where Sholem Aleichem left off a generation before, exploring in this book the transformation of Jewish life.

The titles in this book club series are:

Registration is not required for this event, but it will be used to gauge interest in the program.