Abraham Karpinowitz (Avrom Karpinovitsh) was born in 1913 in Vilna, Poland. He survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and returned briefly to Vilna in 1944. He left Vilna for Palestine in 1947 and after two years in a British internment camp on the island of Cyprus, entered the newly formed state of Israel where he lived until his death in 2004. Karpinowitz wrote seven collections of short stories, two biographies, and a play. He was awarded numerous prizes, including the prestigious Manger Prize (1981).

Helen Mintz is a translator, writer, and performer based in Vancouver, Canada. She was a 2014 Translation Fellow with the Yiddish Book Center. Mintz has written four one-woman shows seeking to reframe contemporary Jewish women’s identity. She has performed these shows in Canada, the United States, Germany, and Lithuania.