Letters to America: Selected Poems of Reuven Ben-Yosef

Reuven Ben-Yosef (1937–2001) was born Robert Eliot Reiss to an assimilated Jewish family in New York. He switched from writing English poetry to Hebrew poetry after his immigration to Israel in 1959. He is the author of more than a dozen volumes of superb Hebrew poetry, as well as two collections of essays and two novels, and he won literary honors such as the Levi Eshkol Prize, the Bar-Ilan University Prize, and the Neuman and Kovner prizes for Hebrew literature. At the center of his oeuvre is the sequence of poems he wrote in the 1970s called "Mikhtavim la’Amerikah" (Letters to America), a searing and confessional set of addresses in the form of "letters" to his family members (none of whom, however, could read Hebrew) and to American Jewry as a whole.

In this edited volume, Weingrad includes not only these expertly translated poems but also an extensive, fascinating introduction that helps us see Ben-Yosef’s personal poetry as part of a larger family story.

Michael Weingrad is associate professor of Judaic studies at Portland State University. He is the author of American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States.