Red Shoes for Rachel: 3 Novellas by Boris Sandler, Translated by Barnett Zumoff

Yiddish Literature in Translation Translated by Barnett Zumoff Red Shoes for Rachel, Sandler’s award-winning collection of three novellas, features tightly wound tales that seamlessly  incorporate diverse genres, including magic realism, satire, and autobiography, and profound psychological profiles to create touching portrayals of the human experience. Zumoff’s translation of Sandler’s original Yiddish collection makes the J. I. Segal Award–winning volume available to English readers for the first time.  In the collection’s eponymous novella, Rachel, a daughter of Holocaust survivors raised in Brighton Beach, encounters a Moldovan Jewish immigrant divorcee as she is tending to her disabled, elderly mother along the Coney Island boardwalk. As the two begin a relationship, the story reveals their past and the commonalities between two children of Holocaust survivors raised in very different societies. In the novella Karolina Bugaz, an exhausted Moldovan Jewish immigrant architect leaves