A Garment Worker's Legacy: The Joe Fishstein Collection of Yiddish Poetry

Norman Ravvin is an assistant professor of English at the University of
New Brunswick. He is the author of Café des Westens, Sex, Skyscrapers,
and Standard Yiddish, and A House of Words.

A Garment Worker’s Legacy is aimed primarily at specialists in Yiddish
literature, who will be able to use its well-organized indexes to access
the impressively broad range of texts collected by Joe Fishstein and now
housed at McGill University. The book includes both English and Yiddish
indexes, and the collection is broken down into generic categories such
as poetry, periodicals, humor, and world literature. In addition to a
useful introductory essay on the collector’s history and milieu, there
is a short essay on the sources of Yiddish language and literature.
These supplementary materials are more or less accessible to newcomers
to the study of Yiddish.

One writer quoted in the book’s introduction describes the Fishstein
collection as “one of the finest single private libraries of Yiddish
literature to be found anywhere.” Lending the collection a special
charm is Fishstein’s habit of creating homemade book jackets for his
volumes; through them his love for his books shines through.