Once There Was Warsaw

Ber Kutsher (1893-1978) was a writer and newspaperman. He came of age in Warsaw between the world wars, and his writing explores the lives of the Yiddish-speaking community in Poland during that time. He published his memoir, Geven amol varshe, in Paris in 1955. Gerald Marcus has been a student and avid reader of Yiddish for more than twenty-five years and grew up surrounded by Yiddish-speaking relatives and friends. He is the translator of Reuben Iceland's memoir, From Our Springtime, and Joseph Rolnik's With Rake in Hand.

Kutsher's memoir is not only a monument of Holocaust remembrance but a testimony to the lives of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.-- "Marc Caplan, author of Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism" Kutsher proves to be an unforgettable storyteller, describing all types and classes of Jews in the Polish metropolis in vivid, and especially humorous, detail. In his translation, Gerald Marcus wonderfully captures the informal, conversational style of Kutsher and by the end of the work, the reader gets to know and appreciate the inner life of the Warsaw Yiddish press, theater, literary world and Jewish street life.-- "Itzik Gottesman, author of Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorist of Poland" The book gives vivid snapshots that in total depicts an important chapter of Polish Jewish cultural history.-- "Jan Schwartz, author of Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after 1945"