DEAR YIDDISH is a startlingly brave and candid rendering of life in the shadow of death. "Sex is over and death soon to come." The beauty of the language and perceptions make 'maturity' one with 'excellence.' Or, as Yeats put it, "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom." It is a celebration of the poet's Jewish heritage, of the roots of his love of language, of the whole of his life in a nutshell, of the drop on a nostril that is the last moment of life, the last line of a poem. Like Donne in his shroud, in "Getting Ready," Fein lists the famous writers and the Yiddish poets and his dearest friends and loved ones and says if they can die, or know that they soon will die, "Why can't I, with my poems, get ready to die?" He will live forever in these poems. The book is an affirmation of the power of poems to keep us alive.

Richard Fein has published twelve books of poetry. His book Kafka's Ear has won the Maurice English Award. He has also published three books of his translations of Yiddish poetry: Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn; With Everything We've Got; The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever. He has also published three books of prose: Robert Lowell, a critical study; The Dance of Leah, a memoir of Yiddish; Yiddish Genesis, personal essays. And a recent collection of poems, Losing It, was published by Box Turtle Press.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York. He taught at Hunter College and the University of Puerto Rico before teaching many years at SUNY, New Paltz. He also spent a year on a Fulbright in India, teaching American literature.

"Richard Fein's lyric genius is marked by one central searching endeavor: to bring English in earshot of its rhyme with Yiddish. It is the kind of necessary and forthright exploitation a serious poet delights in. And it starts when a curious boy on vacation in the Catskills looked way down into the stream Neversink and all he saw was Yiddish letters. The poetry was writ in that childhood water, the cross-currency of pure recollection and intensely exacting concen-tration. And now this book of a lifetime, Dear Yiddish, which is also dear Yeats, and all of it Richard's way of translating himself into the magisterial American poet he has become."
— George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos

"Dear Yiddish is a love letter not only to a language, but to the culture Yiddish embodies and represents, the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe and the diaspora, including Richard Fein's own boroughs of New York City. Yiddish became for Fein a language that helped him discover various wellsprings of his own poetry in English. In his translations and essays, Fein's work on the Yiddish poets became in effect a gift, as Fein writes in the title poem, that returns me to myself. Dear Yiddish as a whole culminates, for example, in Shloshim, Fein's profoundly moving elegy for his wife thirty days after her death. Here the poet looks without flinching at the moment when the dead really go away from us. Fein's life-long relationship with Yiddish taught him, I think, how to hold that gaze upon loss, and how to shape English words that would express it. For Richard Fein, a gift on that order is what makes Yiddish so unequivocally dear."
— Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)

"In a poem appropriately called The Connection, near the beginning of his eloquent and moving new book, Richard Fein writes: The tender violence of recall/becomes a tripwire setting off/bits of memory... The Yiddish language itself and the Yiddish poetry Fein remembers and translates trigger that tripwire. The title poem of Dear Yiddish is a surprisingly erotic love poem to an entire language. But as Fein's readers have already come to know, all of his poems are love poems."
— Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Who's on First? New and Selected Poems