“I think a lot about the past. The beautiful, romantic past of Yiddish literature, and the beautiful romantic past of our language.”

In this luminously etched memoir, Peretz Hirshbein takes us back to the dawn of the twentieth century, when “the Jewish heart was still in one piece” and his vocation as a writer was taking flight. Young and penniless in the urban thrum of Vilna—“the Jerusalem of Lithuania”—the former Talmud student teaches Hebrew to children as he writes plays and, with pensive dedication, hones his artistic and intellectual identity. Should one make money from literature, or is the pen purely a vessel for his art? Is Hebrew or Yiddish his better medium, and—amid the political tumult of the first Russian Revolution—must he align with the Bundists or the Labor Zionists?

Over the next decade, the yearning and restless Hirshbein moves between Vilna, Odessa, Berlin, and Warsaw, founds a successful theater company, and forges close ties with his fellow literary trailblazers. Contending with censorship and police persecution, his sense of truly belonging ever elusive, he nevertheless nurtures faith in the future of Yiddish literature and its vital place in Jewish life.

By turns elegiac and rueful, intimate and wise, In the Course of Life is a beguiling portrait of a vibrant transnational culture and a stirring meditation on the multifaceted, fragile concept of home.