Call it literary deja vu, the striking sensation that the text you’re reading is somehow already known to you, baked into your ancestral DNA. I felt it upon encountering Rachel Veprinski’s Hand in Hand, an autobiographical novel based on the author’s relationship with her longtime lover, the Yiddish poet Mani Leyb. Originally published in 1971, it was translated from Yiddish for the first time in 2026 by Ellen Cassedy and Anita Norich.
An innate sense of knowing is also what Veprinski’s protagonist, Miriam Eidelberg, experiences upon meeting the lauded poet Nyezhiner on a blustery New York City night in 1918. As they embark on a life-changing walk across the Williamsburg Bridge Miriam thinks, “How odd … that this person she’d just met, with whom she’d spoken for the first time today, should seem both familiar and unfamiliar, like a long lost relative.” This sentiment is then echoed by Nyezhiner himself right after their first kiss that evening, when he clutches her hands and says, “We’ve just met, but we’ve known each other for years. Am I right?” The intoxicating combo of astonishment and recognition is what sends lovestruck Miriam and Nyezhiner to great lengths to be together.
Of course, things are not so simple. Young Miriam is unhappily married to a stable if underwhelming pharmacist named David. She has a daughter, Dinaleh. Nyezhiner, a decade her senior, and already estranged from his wife and five children, has already had his share of extramarital affairs, and yet is still tethered to his family financially. As they begin to extricate themselves from their respective domestic situations, the yearning that ensues, the separations they endure, the letters they write, the miscommunications and rededications that transpire, and the aching moments of oneness they steal should cement their place among literature’s iconic couples.
Despite being published in the early 1970s and set on the heels of World War I, the story feels remarkably current. There is little deliberation, no belabored hand-wringing: Miriam swiftly exits her lackluster home. She even leaves her daughter until she can get settled in her own place. Outcast, deemed “unkosher,” she is liberated from the shackles of convention. “The girlish joy of being free, of belonging to no one, returned. It was a rare, pure sensation that made her feel as if she were swimming alone in a clear stream flowing just for her.”
In the summer months, Miriam heads up to the Catskills with her daughter. Nyezhiner, agonized by longing, makes repeated trips to visit her, both alone and with one of his daughters. Miriam is near bursting with anticipation. “It would be good to feel the warmth of his body again, to snuggle with him like birds in a nest.” Veprinski is not particularly subtle in her descriptions of their passion. “Then all at once those lips vibrated like the strings of a violin, and they fell upon each other, mouth to mouth, bone to bone.”
If their love feels over the top, that’s because it is infused with a self-conscious, lyric impulse.
Nyezhiner says, “ ‘I don’t deserve all this. You’ve fallen like a quivering dove into my hand.’ ”
Miriam replies: “‘That sounds like a line from a poem.’ ‘Yes, it might become one.’ ”
Their relationship unfolds against the shabby, bohemian backdrop of New York’s young poet scene, Di Yunge, rife with camaraderie, competition, inspiration, and infidelity. Veprinski does a wonderful job of bringing this colorful cast of secondary characters to life, many of whom were inspired by real poets of the era. And she delights in pointing out their contradictory urges: “Even anarchists have bourgeois tendencies.”
The reader can hear the rich, figurative language of Yiddish pulsing through the translation. The subversive play on “foreignness” is particularly amusing. Miriam’s husband, David, eager to assimilate, invokes a smattering of English phrases which appear in the novel italicized. For example, David promises his daughter “a gud taym.” Meanwhile, a heartsick Nyenzhiner calls himself “crenky”, following up this Yiddishized English with idiosyncratic flourish: “I look like a lost soul at a stranger’s wedding, like a worm in horseradish.”
Does all the hand-in-hand imagery start to feel overwrought? Sure. But that is a minor quibble in an otherwise fresh yet familiar, wholly irresistible story of ache and desire, recognition and liberation, and the actions we are willing to take to free ourselves from societal expectation in the name of self-assertion, artistic ambition, poetry, and love.
Sara Lippmann is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. She is co-editor of Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible and co-founder of the Writing Co-lab, an online teaching cooperative based in Brooklyn. Her new novel, Hidden River, will be published in 2026.
