Der Nister—literally The Hidden One—was the pen name of Pinkhus Kahanovich. Born 1884, in the city of Berdychiv, in what is now Ukraine, in 1920 he went into brief exile, returning to the Soviet Union in 1925. In 1950, he was arrested in conditions of secrecy, and died shortly thereafter in a prison hospital. To date the only book-length translations of his work into English are of the social-realist novel The Family Mashber, and Regrowth, a collection of posthumously published short stories.