Mani Leyb (1883-1953), the pen name of Mani Leyb Brahinsky, was a Yiddish writer and shoemaker born in Niezhin (now Nezhin), Ukraine, under Russian imperial rule. In his youth, Leyb was jailed twice for agitating against the tsar and striking. In 1905, Leyb fled to America, creating a life for himself in New York; he continued writing in his free time. Influenced by Russian poets, Leyb helped found Di Yunge, a group of writers who strove to write pure poetry that was apolitical and elevated the ordinary. Despite Leyb’s influence on modern Yiddish poetry, much of his work remains untranslated.
Adam Tapper is a junior at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in Chicago, Illinois. He primarily translates from German and Yiddish into English. Adam is an editor-in-chief of Ouroboros Review, the Laboratory Schools’ literary translation journal. His translations of contemporary German poetry have been published in Modern Poetry In Translation. His translation of Franz Kafka’s Wunsch, Indianer zu werden appears in author Ken Krimstein’s graphic biography, Einstein in Kafkaland (Bloomsbury, 2024). Adam holds a translation certificate from the University of Bristol’s Bristol Translates program and is a 2024 fellow of the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference.