On the Edge

Nokhum Borukh Minkov (1893–1958) was born to a modern-thinking family in Warsaw. Though his mother was much more comfortable in Yiddish, his Russified father forbade Yiddish in the home. Minkov came to the U.S. just before the outbreak of World War I, first to San Francisco, where he wanted to study medicine, and then to New York, where he ended up at NYU Law School. There he befriended Yankev Glatshteyn, also a law student, and fell in with the Yiddish literary crowd. In those early days he could often be seen in the cafes doggedly studying Yiddish, pestering his soon-to-be-fellow poets about vocabulary and points of grammar. Though he would ultimately author five books of poetry, he is today noted and remembered primarily for his later works of literary critical scholarship, including studies of Elye Bokher and Glikl Hamel, as well as Classic Yiddish Poets (1939), Six Yiddish Critics (1954), and his three-volume masterwork Pioneers of Yiddish Poetry in America (1956)