New Release - The Primordium

To order your copy, please click HERE, or go directly to Amazon.com.
A modernist Yiddish creation myth which feels equally Zoharic and Kafkaesque. A wild avant-garde trip into the tortured mind of God. Wolski’s translation of Der Nister’s astonishing Yiddish prose and Kraus’s visual midrash are exquisite.
—Melila Hellner-Eshed, author of A River Flows from Eden: On the Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar, and Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba
 
A profound myth of Divine unfolding, of the dialectical interplay between Being and Nothingness. In his wondrous, sparkling translation, Nathan Wolski has made this gem of Yiddish literature available to the wider world. Reading this short story takes you on a spiritual journey to the beyond.
—Daniel Matt, author of Becoming Elijah and the multivolume,
annotated translation, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition
Image
A kabbalistically-suffused, hyper-anthropomorphic myth about creation by a master of Yiddish modernism, Der Nister’s Primordium (Der Kadmen, 1910) takes the reader deep into the mind of God preceding creation, and narrates his precarious and tortured quest for self-consciousness and expression. Tracing the Primordium’s maturation across cosmic eons in the face of his own doubts and fear, and in the face of cosmic silence and nothingness, Der Nister’s Der Kadmen is a meditation on the dialectics of being and nothingness, and one of the boldest experiments in writing Jewish myth in modernity. Critically annotated, adorned and unveiled by ten paintings, this bilingual edition will delight scholars of Kabbalah and Yiddish alike. Translated, Introduced and Annotated by Nathan Wolski; Artwork and design by Tunni Kraus; Preface by Aubrey L. Glazer


OUR WORK

DOING

Learn More

FEELING

Learn More

THINKING

Learn More

UNIFYING

Learn More
DONATE NOW