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Celebrated Israeli author and Nobel Prize laureate S.Y. Agnon wrote his first novella And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight over 100 years ago. It has been translated for the first time into English by Michael Kramer and is newly published with Toby Press. Host Marcela Sulak reads the opening of this folktale that still bears lessons for us in the modern era.

Here is an excerpt from translator Michael Karmer’s introduction to this work:

“It was a tale that looked away from the new yishuv, back to an earlier time and place, to mid-nineteenth century Buczacz, to the near-mythic eastern European world of the grandparents of the new settlers. It told of Menashe Chaim HaCohen and his wife, Kreindel Charne, a childless Hasidic couple who ran a modestly successful general store; told of their pitiable, inexorable descent into poverty; of the husband’s reluctant leaving home and his humiliating (if also often humorous) travels through the cities and towns of Galicia to gather alms for their survival; of his abandoned wife and the tragic complications that follow his delayed return.”

Text:
And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, by S. Y. Agnon, translated by Michael Kramer. Toby Press, 2017.

Music:
Yiddish Hora – A Heymish Freylekhs – The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble
Sha, Sha, Di Shviger Kumt – The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble