Mikhl Yashinsky is a translator, playwright-lyricist, singer-actor, and teacher in New York City. He was born in Detroit and graduated with a degree in European history and literature from Harvard. His translation of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska's memoirs, The Mother of Yiddish Theatre, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. He has taught Yiddish at Columbia, the University of Michigan, and Tel Aviv University and co-authored the award-winning Yiddish language textbook In eynem (White Goat Press). Jonas Kreppel was born into a middle-class family in Drohobycz, Galicia, in 1874. A gifted Talmudic prodigy, he was destined for the rabbinate but instead found his calling as a journalist, editor, civil servant, and intellectual writing in numerous languages. Settling in Vienna around 1914, his main activity for the next three decades was editing a German-Jewish weekly and writing a series of books on Jewish and world politics. Between 1924 and 1930 he published almost a hundred slim storybooks in four main series: historical tales, Hasidic legends, stories of World War I, and crime fiction.