A Review. Jan. 29, 2025

Mikhail Krutikov, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan wrote a review of my book in Yiddish for The Forward newspaper. I like the review a lot because it "gets" the essence of what the book is. Here it is, translated it into English.

Peretz Miransky’s daughter learns about him through his work.

By Mikhail Krutikov

“To write about a subject one should know it well.  Yet I did not know my father, the Yiddish poet and fabulist Peretz Miransky at all well, either as a child or as an adult in the years we had together.”

This is how Anna Miransky opens this book about her father “Poem by Poem, Fable by Fable”.  In his youth, Peretz Miransky (1908-1993) belonged to the literary group Yung Vilne.  He survived the Holocaust in Uzbekistan in the Soviet Union, but his wife and child remained in Vilna and perished.  In Uzbekistan, Miransky married again and after the war the family immigrated to Canada.  Their daughter Anna was born during their voyage across the ocean.

The family settled in Montreal, where there was at that time, a Yiddish speaking cultural community. Yiddish was Anna’s first language and for a few years, she attended the Yiddish Folkshule.  Later, they moved to Toronto where they enrolled her in a public school because the local Yiddish school was too “left” for her father’s taste.  And that’s how Anna’s knowledge of Yiddish remained quite limited, the way it often happens for immigrant families in North America.  The parents spoke Yiddish to one other but the children spoke and studied in English.

The relationship between father and daughter was not great.  Peretz never learned English well. The language was an obstacle that impeded their understanding of one another.  He told his children little about his life in eastern Europe.  Anna first began to become more closely acquainted with her father after his death in 1993, when she started to read his writing in Yiddish, one poem a day.  In order to improve her Yiddish, she studied in summer programs, and in order to understand all the details in the poems, she sought advice from experts in Yiddish culture, especially from Professor David Roskies who was her classmate in the Montreal Yiddish Folkshule.

Anna Miransky is a psychotherapist by profession, and this informs her approach to her father’s poems.  She divides the book into themes which she deems important both for Peretz Miransky’s writing and for his life. She uses poems as a magnifying glass which allows her to know her father’s personality and experiences.  The poems reveal new important details about Peretz Miransky’s life in his old home.  The poem “Midnight” describes one day in the city of Samarkand in Uzabekistan.  The writer misses his wife and his child, who remained in Vilna. 

Midnight

I sit alone

like a stone

overturned

from the earth

in a dark space.

I am far, I fly far

to my wife and child

to my home.

Anna Miransky relates that she found out about her father’s first wife and child accidentally, when she overheard a conversation between adults.  It was only much later that Peretz shared with her a few details about them, but never even spoke their names.  The poem helped her better understand her father’s trauma: “but they and their place in my father’s life, have become more real to me after reading this poem.” 

This same poem made a bitter impression on Anna.  “Something in me resonated with the loneliness, which I believe I both “inherited” from my parents and acquired because of their preoccupation with their own inner wounds, leaving them unable to turn their full attention to their children.”  She maintains that this kind of distress and loneliness is a kind of psychological inheritance of many children whose parents survived the Holocaust.  These children grew up without grandparents and extended family and remained alienated from their cultural community and their parents. 

Peretz Miransky acquired a reputation in Yiddish literature primarily because of his fables.  Before the war, they were popular with Yiddish readers in Poland, and he continued writing fables in Canada, where he published several books.  His daughter claims that this helped him maintain a spiritual connection with his old home, “to the landscape he knew and had loved so much.”   She notices that the fables are full of different kinds of animals and plants, which all have their own Yiddish names and are described with precise detail. Here, one should note that nature was a popular theme for other writers from Yung-Vilne and also for the older writers Leib Naytus and Moshe Kolbak. 

For a historian of Yiddish literature, it will be especially interesting to read about the friendship between Miransky and Chaim Grade.  They knew each other well in Vilna and spent the war years in Soviet Central Asia.  Both had families that remained in Vilna and perished in the Holocaust.  Anna Miransky summarizes the relationship between her father and Grade:  “both men longed for Vilna, both men mourned loved ones….they were intimate friends and spiritual companions bound to one another in their love and longing for their lost world.”

Anna Miransky brings together two different genres in her book, literary critical translations of her father’s writing and her own life story.  The poems open a route to her father’s soul which remained closed to her during the time he was alive.  And the poems allow her to better understand herself.  They reveal the roots of her own loneliness.  “Poem by Poem, Fable by Fable” is a remarkable creative accomplishment, which brings together the past and the present, writing and living, the creative imagination and a sharp psychological analysis.