Placing each group in its historic and literary content with comprehensive introductory essays, Professor Kramer presents works mostly unavailable in English -- until now. For the very first time, readers can become familiar with poets who experienced the horrors of the ghettos and the death camps and survived: Soviet poets; American poets who were forever transformed by the Holocaust. Kramer also introduces the 1944 Terezin opera Der Kaiser yon Atlantis.

The Last Lullaby is a testament to the richness of a half-annihilated language that, in the pain of its survivors, was made more beautiful than ever before. Unlike most other current translators, Kramer insists on maintaining the music of the original Yiddish, the often "folkish" cadence and rhyme which, he believes, are a precious part of these poems' legacy.