A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York

<p>In an illustrative style that is a thrilling mash-up of Art Spiegelman's deft emotionality, Roz Chast's hilarious neuroses, and the magical spirit of Marc Chagall, A Bintel Brief is Liana Finck's evocative, elegiac love letter to the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants who transformed New York City and America itself.</p><p>A Bintel Brief &quot;A Bundle of Letters&quot; - was the enormously popular advice column of The Forward, the widely read Yiddish language newspaper begun in 1906 New York. 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.</p><p>Drawn from these letters - selected and adapted by Liana Finck and brought to life in her appealing two-color illustrations - A Bintel Brief is a tour of Lower East Side New York, and includes an imaginative conversation with the Yiddish &quot;Dear Abby,&quot; Abraham Cahan, The Forward's legendary editor and creator of the Bintel Brief column.</p><p>From premarital sex to family politics to struggles with jobs and money, A Bintel Brief is an enlightening look at a segment of America's rich cultural past that offers fresh insights for our own lives as well.</p><p></p>