A Mentsh Is a Mentsh in Any Language: How Five Little Gefiltes Crossed the Atlantic and Came Back Speaking Yiddish

Gefiltes, in its premiere week on an American screen — and a conversation about how the book traveled to Sweden, came home animated, and what it says about the new Jewish culture being made in Yiddish right now. Horowitz is joined by his Swedish publisher and the film’s creative producer, Sarah Schulman of Dos Nisele, and by Helene Berg and Isabella A Johanson, who animated and co-directed Gefiltlekh finf. Together they trace the book’s unlikely second life: Horowitz’s mixed-method art process, the journey from English and Yinglish into Swedish and then into Yiddish with translator Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch, and the work of taking flat illustrations apart and rebuilding them as animation. Behind one picture book sits a larger story. On both sides of the Atlantic, writers, publishers, composers and animators are working from deep inside Jewish and Yiddish culture to produce something new — not curating a tradition but adding to it. A new Jewish culture is taking shape around them. Gefiltlekh finf premiered at BUFF and opened the International Jewish Film Festival, both in Malmö, Sweden. This week brings its first public screenings in the United States. It plays in Yiddish with English subtitles, with a klezmer score by Alexander Freudenthal and the voices of the legendary John Gradowski, Izzy Schulman, and Isabella A Johanson as Mama Gefilte. Fem små gefiltes (Dos Nisele Farlag, 2025), translated by Stephan Mendel-Enk, is a 2026 Peter Pan Award nominee in Sweden. Dave Horowitz’s English original was a 2008 Sydney Taylor Notable Book. The evening will include a screening of the film, a behind-the-scene presentation (including films from the stop-motion workshop on October 24th) and a conversation moderated by Sarah Schulman, followed by an audience Q A and signing. Copies of the book will be available for purchase in English as Five Little Gefiltes and in Swedish as Fem små gefiltes. [/vccolumntext][/vccolumn][/vcrow][vcrow][vccolumn width= 1/3 ][vcsingleimage image= 161294 css= ][/vccolumn][vccolumn width= 2/3 ][vccolumntext css= ] Dave Horowitz Dave Horowitz • Photo Credit: Rachel Crozier Dave Horowitz is an artist and writer who has written and illustrated more than twenty children’s picture books, among them Five Little Gefiltes, The Ugly Pumpkin, and Humpty Dumpty Climbs Again. His books are built from mixed methods — drawing, cut-paper, collage and hand-lettering layered together — and a deadpan humor that lands as easily with adults as with children. He is also a paramedic with fifteen years of experience in EMS, and recently published Medic: A Diary, a graphic memoir about ambulance life. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. [/vccolumntext][/vccolumn][/vcrow][vcrow][vccolumn width= 1/3 ][vcsingleimage image= 161296 css= ][/vccolumn][vccolumn width= 2/3 ][vccolumntext css= ] Sarah Schulman Photo Credit: André Prtic Sarah Schulman is a publisher and cultural producer who makes new Jewish and Yiddish culture for contemporary audiences. She founded Dos Nisele, the Yiddish press behind Georg Riedel’s Yiddishland — a new canon of Yiddish songs created with one of Scandinavia’s most celebrated composers — and behind Fem små gefiltes and its animated Yiddish adaptation, Gefiltlekh finf, which she produced. She sits on the board of the Yiddish Society and helped build Jiddischklubben (The Yiddish Club), a weekly gathering where families come back to Yiddish through play. She received Sweden’s Minority Language Prize in 2025, and works between New York and Stockholm. [/vccolumntext][/vccolumn][/vcrow][vcrow][vccolumn width= 1/3 ][vcsingleimage image= 161293 css= ][/vccolumn][vccolumn width= 2/3 ][vccolumntext css= ] Helene Berg Photo Credit: Self-portrait Helene Berg is an artist and animator working in moving image, and co-director of Gefiltlekh finf. Her animated projections and visuals have been staged internationally, at Stockholm’s Stadsteatern, Dansens Hus and Fylkingen, at Örebro Länsteater, and at Dupont Underground in Washington, D.C. For more than fifteen years she has led animation workshops for museums, schools and arts organizations, from Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm to the National Art Museum in Minsk. She holds a degree in art history from Uppsala University, and lives and works in Stockholm. [/vccolumntext][/vccolumn][/vcrow][vcrow][vccolumn width= 1/3 ][vcsingleimage image= 161295 css= ][/vccolumn][vccolumn width= 2/3 ][vccolumntext css= ] Isabella A Johanson Photo Credit: Self-portrait Isabella A Johanson is a film director, screenwriter and producer, and co-director of Gefiltlekh finf, in which she also voices Mama Gefilte. She wrote and directed In Georg Riedel’s Yiddishland for Swedish national television, and has produced series for the public broadcasters SVT and UR, among them Sweden, the Crisis and Me. She taught film and television production at upper-secondary level for years, and now leads animation workshops for children — most recently Animations, Yiddish, supported by the Swedish Film Institute. She lives and works outside Stockholm. [/vccolumntext][/vccolumn][/vcrow][vcrow][vccolumn][vccolumntext css= ]This event is sponsored by the Consulate General of Sweden.[/vccolumntext][vcsingleimage image= 143133 css=.vccustom1789068465055{margin-top: 11px!important;} ][/vccolumn][/vcrow][vcrow][vccolumn][vccolumntext css= ]Presented in partnership with Dos Nisele.[/vccolumntext][vcsingleimage image= 161310 css= ][/vccolumn][/vcrow]