“Jane Yolen, master storyteller of myth and fantasy offers us a different kind of tale this time—a compelling, unsentimental family narrative told eloquently in verse. She recreates 'a lifetime, a country, a shtetl' and one family’s circuitous and rocky journey toward the American Dream. In her vivid, poetic resurrection of family, Jane Yolen confirms what I always suspected—that storytelling is an integral part of her ancestral DNA.”—Mira Bartok, author of The Memory Palace (New York Times bestselling memoir, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner)
“What is the hunger, so fundamental, to know the generations long gone who gave birth to us—to know intimately their stories, their pogram heartache, their immigrant pluck? Jane Yolen remembers, imagines, invents her shtetl bubbies and greenhorn zaydies, her bootleg uncles, vividly resurrecting them with insight, vision, compassion, love. We sit at the table wide-eyed, enchanted by her gift inherited from them—the well-told story.”—Merle Feld, author of A Spiritual Life: Exploring the Heart and Jewish Tradition and Finding Words
“Jane Yolen’s Ekaterinoslav is a rich salmagundi of speculative autobiography and imagined reminiscence, marinated in compelling verse. The reader is pulled along inexorably with an unforgettable cast of kinfolk through fortune and folly from an 1870s Ukrainian shtetl to Ellis Island. Ekaterinoslav is as beautiful a celebration of life—and lament for death—as you would expect from one of the world's foremost storytellers.”—J. Patrick Lewis, U.S. Children's Poet Laureate (2011-2013)
“When death, 'that old interrupter,' claims Jane Yolen's father, she learns that he was born in Ekaterinoslav, not New Haven and named Wolf, not Will. A poet's job is to turn facts into truths, and Yolen, a master storyteller, does this beautifully in this memoir-in-verse, which brings to life another time and place that no longer exists, but thanks to Yolen, will now never be forgotten. I was mesmerized by these moving, heartfelt poems.”—Lesléa Newman, author of October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard
“Jane Yolen’s new work, Ekaterinoslav, is a moving memoir, part family story, part immigrant fable. The strong narrative pull of the poems propels the reader forward wanting to know what will happen next with each personality deftly captured in the sparest descriptions of a few sharp lines. The shifting mood of the story weaves gracefully through the poems, skillfully translating historical facts and family truths. The final poem offers a personal, powerful conclusion, as Yolen moves from the past to the present using poetry 'to reinvent moment and memory.'”—Sylvia M. Vardell, Ph.D., author of Poetry Aloud Here and The Poetry Teacher's Book of Lists
"Jane Yolen knows the outlines, not the details, or even many of the major steps of her family’s journey, and she uses the imagination that has helped her create more than 300 children’s books as well as her family trove of old photographs to create a poetic re-creation that, in unrhymed, very loose-metered lines, makes a splendid piece of theater of the mind, distinctive yet universal, based on one of America’s foundational legends."—Ray Olsen, Booklist
