‘A Bintel Brief’ brings to life popular advice column from early 20th century
Author to speak in Cobble Hill
“A Bintel Brief” (Yiddish for “A Bundle of Letters”) was the name of the enormously popular advice column The Forward newspaper began running in 1906. Written by a diverse community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, these letters spoke to the daily heartbreaks and comedies of their new lives, capturing the hope, isolation, and confusion of assimilation.
Drawn from a sampling of these letters—selected and adapted by Liana Finck and brought to life in her poignant illustrations—“A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York” (Ecco Trade Paperback Original) is a hilarious and heartbreaking glimpse of the lives of immigrants on the Lower East Side of New York at the start of the 20th century. Finck will speak about her book in Brooklyn on Friday, April 18 at BookCourt in Cobble Hill.
From family politics to judgmental neighbors, crises of faith, unrequited love, runaway husbands, soul crushing poverty and the difficulty of building an entirely new life from scratch, “A Bintel Brief” is an enlightening look at a segment of America’s rich cultural past that offers fresh insights for our own lives.