Duluth’s Holy Cow! Press author Jane Yolen, author of Kaddish: Before the Holocaust and After, has been awarded the Sophie Brody Medal for 2022.

The Sophie Brody Award is an annual award of the American Library Association. It is given for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature, for works published the previous year, in the United States.

The book, produced by Holy Cow! Press of Duluth, is important and powerful. As editor Jim Perlman says, “Taking on a difficult and deeply disturbing subject for a poetry collection and publishing it as a small press publisher in a time of pandemic and varying degrees of anti-Semitism was a challenge. We are lucky to have Jane Yolen’s great skills as a poet, to imagine the horrors of that era, make it personal, and feel the lines as they have been lived.”

I’ve read all the books Yolen has published with Holy Cow!, and they are all worthwhile — Jim is right, we are lucky.

Perlman ends with an exhortation we might all consider: This collection should be read as a teaching and as a warning.” I would add — it is also a thing of art, of a kind of beauty, too — so many reasons to read an important book, locally produced.