This work was commissioned by Pascal Le Boeuf in honor of his and Molly Herron’s anniversary on November 16, 2019. The text is a love letter from Alexander Harkavy’s 1902 Amerikikanisher brifen-shteler (American Letter Writer), a bilingual letter writing manual for Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants, with letters in English and Yiddish. The Yiddish in Harkavy’s book reflects spelling and dialect variations, as well as word borrowing which was commonplace in pre-standardized Yiddish. To make the text easier to understand and work with it has been gently adapted and updated to standard modern Yiddish by the composer.
