MENKE SONNETS

Menke Katz

Menke Katz (1906-1991) was the only Yiddish poet this century who became a major poet in English as well. The Smith, his primary publisher in English, now has begun publishing his Yiddish works.

MENKE SONNETS is a hardcover book that contains his last poems and collects all his Yiddish sonnets. A few months before his death, he had completed his eighteenth book (nine are in Yiddish, nine in English). Then, his mother Badonna came to him in a dream, in his forest house in Spring Glen, New York. Standing by the bank of the Viliya River, which surrounds her native village, Michalishek, she told him to write only in Yiddish from that day onward. Of course he obeyed, and the results now appear in this, Menke Katz's last book of verse.

Inventor of many unique poetic forms, one of his most beloved is his "Menke Sonnet," which goes from two to fifteen syllables, or fifteen to two. They are informally known as "Menke triangles" because of their shape.

MENKE SONNETS comprises the sections: "Against Lock and Rhyme" (Menke fought rhyme in both languages); "Yiddish, Michalishek, Svintsyan" (on the language he loved most and the poor villages of his youth in Lithuania); "New York"; "Israel." In the final chapter, "The Will," the poet confronts death. The last sonnet, "Night in night out," is incomplete, as if waiting for the Messiah to come and finish it, as Menke might well have said. It was written in the early hours of the day of his death, April 24, 1991.

The Smith's publication of this lovely Yiddish volume is not an end but a beginning. Publisher Harry Smith announced that he has fortunately secured the services of leading translators Benjamin and Barbara Harshav to translate all of Menke Katz's Yiddish books into English. The result will be a giant bilingual edition to be published in late 1996.

ISBN: 0-912292-96, 264 pp., cloth, $15.95

• A CHAIR FOR ELIJAH, "Internationally acclaimed visions of a lifetime."
  $6.95 paper, $9.95 cloth, 96 pp. (poetry)

• BURNING VILLAGE, "World War I equivalent of Guernica"
  $10.00 cloth, 136 pp. (poetry)

• NEARBY EDEN "Personal and mystic, prophetic and earthy."
  $10.95 paper, $18.95 cloth, 128 pp. (poetry)

• FOREVER AND EVER AND A WEDNESDAY "'True legends' of time-lost village."
  $10.00 cloth, $6.00 paper, 80 pp. (fiction)

• TWO FRIENDS II, Menke Katz and Harry Smith. "Poet-pals face off again in sequel to their earlier poetic adventure Two Friends." Published by Birch Brook Press, but available through The Smith.
  $11.95 paper, $20.00 cloth, 112 pp. (poetry)