This is the story of Yiddish, its near destruction and astonishing survival. It is also the story of a penniless, charming writer on a mission to save his language, and a historian on a quest to follow him to the ends of a rapidly vanishing world.

As a child, acclaimed author Rachel Lichtenstein heard stories of the émigré Polish poet from her grandparents. They had been regular members of his iconic Yiddish literary society, begun in East London in the Blitz, attending every Saturday afternoon for years.

When as an adult Lichtenstein began to dig deeper, she realised that her family were part of a much larger and more extraordinary story, of the survival of Yiddish against seemingly impossible odds. Yiddish speakers defied the devastations of the twentieth century simply by speaking insistently in their mother tongue, over books and food, in cafés and cabarets, kosher luncheon clubs, Lyons tea shops and literary societies, like her grandparents and their elusive friend.

Travelling from the East End across Germany and Poland to New York, from long-shuttered synagogues to suburban retirement homes and emptied villages, Lichtenstein excavates the vibrant Yiddish-speaking worlds her family and their friend once inhabited and the haunting absences that continue to resound within those places. But she also finds a new community of her own, redefining Jewish life in diaspora for a new generation.

This is a record of exile and survival, erasure and recovery, displacement and return. It is an elegy to lost Jewish worlds, and a tribute to the resilience of a people and their language.