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In 1935, the Second Polish Republic, despite its accelerating drift toward authoritarianism and the massive revival of anti-Semitism, was still the freest country in Europe for the kind of political, religious, and artistic expression that had its roots in Yiddish culture. Warsaw, its capital city, was second to none in the intensity and quality of its Yiddish journalism, literature, and theater. Warsaw’s Yiddish writers had no doubt that they were working in a mature medium for a discerning, lively readership that was ready to consume both world-class shlock, serialized in mass newspapers, and rarefied modernist experiments published in the first issue of avant-garde journals that would never see a second. The ferment that was 1930’s Poland yielded a slew of literary masterpieces. One of them, Yehoshue Perle’s semi-autobiographical Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life, has now been published in an excellent English translation as a volume in the New Yiddish Library.

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