Publisher's Synopsis
A bilingual collection of erotic poems - in Yiddish, English, and transliteration. PRAISE: What could be better than hot, steamy Yiddish sex rendered into rich, captivating verse? Troim Katz-Handler's love poems are not only an absolute joy to read, but they explode linguistic and cultural stereotypes, and enrich the Yiddish literary landscape with erotic rhapsodies that were always in people's heads, but never on the page. - Eddy Portnoy, PhD, author of Bad Rabbi And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press, Academic Advisor and Exhibition Curator at the YIVO // She writes about that which stirs and impresses her and, more importantly, that which disturbs her the most. She is a free spirit. Yiddish has found a safe haven in the dauntless originality of Troim Katz Handler's poetry. - Miriam Hoffman, author, scholar, journalist, playwright, and former lecturer in Yiddish at Columbia University // Troim Katz-Handler's poetry is full of urgency - you can sense that the words hastening to get onto the page in the same spirit of the characters' heartbeats are quickening as they maintain their passionate affair from afar. And what else can I say? It's hot! - Christa Whitney, Director of the National Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project // In Simkhe II, with text presented side by side in Yiddish, transliterated Yiddish, and equally striking English translation, Troim Katz Handler continues her groundbreaking Yiddish epistolary love poetry project begun in Simkhe (2001), but with even greater insistence on erotic lyricism and unflinching candor. The passion of her star-crossed protagonists, Tema and Simkhe - drenched in longing and honed by a singularity of focus - burns like a fever dream into the reader's consciousness. Katz Handler brings a dazzling sensuality and an embodiment to these poems as well as a rootedness in her beloved Yiddish, refusing any preconceived limitations on a Yiddish poetics and, through her linguistic inventiveness, expanding the terrain of its possibility. -Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, author of A moyz tsvishn vakldike volkn-kratsers: geklibene Yidishe lider/A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems // Sex in Yiddish. Sex in Yiddish poetry. Heterosex in Yiddish poetry. Heterosex and love in Yiddish poetry. Handler insists our mame-loshn embrace its physical and emotional reality with poems that describe the feverish and funny encounters between two lovers. She presents the reader with a comprehensive vocabulary for making love in Yiddish. Read and learn. - Irena Klepfisz, lesbian/feminist activist and author of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems // An audacious venture that expands the boundaries of erotic expression in Yiddish poetry. - Miriam Leberstein, translator and teacher of Yiddish // I celebrate the publication of the new, second volume of Simkhe, by Troim Katz Handler. She has revived Yiddish poetry in an unforgettable way, with a poetic strength, a warm and lyrical approach, and romantic and sensual power of the imagination. Yiddish and English readers should be proud of this new and rich collection of poems. - Miryem-Khaye Seigel, Yiddish singer/songwriter, librarian, researcher and author in Yiddish Studies // Erotic poetry exists in dozens of languages, but Yiddish? Who knew? This fearless woman, Troim Katz Handler, has boldly gone where no Yiddish poet has gone before, enfleshing her two imagined lovers in a whirling world of eros that is tender and tempestuous, unabashed and unapologetic. Imagine "The Song of Solomon," only hotter! - Mikhail Horowitz, poet and performance artist // For too long sexual taboos have smothered Yiddish literary culture. At last a revolutionary writer has stepped on to the stage to shatter them. The composition of her magnificent poetry incorporates the results of her original delving into the largely undocumented Yiddish terminology of female sexuality. - Nydorf & Robinson, translators, teachers, researchers
