Yiddish Humor in the Face of Wartime Trauma presents the historically contextualised memoir of noted Yiddish comedian and actor, Shimon Dzigan (1905-1980), translated into English for the very first time. Dzigan's lively and humorous personal account reveals much about the experience of interwar Poland, the two World Wars, wartime USSR and life as a performer and immigrant in postwar Israel.

The memoir recounts Dzigan's unique stage and screen career as one half of the famed 'Dzigan and Schumacher' double act, but it also serves as a compelling personal testimony that sheds light on darker aspects of this period in European and world history. The book is a window into the wartime struggles of hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews and there is significant coverage of the turbulent years of the Second World War, much of which Dzigan spent performing imprisoned in the gulag in Central Asia, as the harsh realities of Stalin's Soviet Union came to bear.

Dzigan's writing is layered with colorful anecdotes and comic asides as he takes the reader from his humble youth in Lodz to performing in Israel after the war. The Holocaust cost Yiddish most if its performers and audiences, but afterward Dzigan played a significant role in helping survivors to cope, in part, through laughter.

Diego Rotman is Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of The Yiddish Stage as a Temporary Home: Dzigan and Shumacher's Satirical Theater (1927-1980), which received the prestigious Shapiro Prize for the Best Book in Israel Studies.

Miriam Isaacs is an independent scholar based in the USA. Dr Isaacs was a Professor of Yiddish Language and Culture at the University of Maryland, USA for 16 years and completed a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2013. She is a native Yiddish speaker and a scholar of Yiddish with numerous publications in the field.