From a simple nudge, oft-repeated, a 500-page volume took shape. “When are you going to do the next ‘Harvest’ anthology?” professor emeritus Robert (Bob) Kohn would ask one of his exercise buddies, Howard Schwartz.

During those mutual moments of huffing and puffing, it mattered little that Kohn, an essayist, had taught economics, or that widely published poet and author Schwartz, now a professor emeritus, immersed himself for decades in teaching English and retelling Jewish folktales.

Most important, Kohn’s question, always delivered in what Schwartz calls “his own sweet way,” led Schwartz to contact Barbara Raznick, director of the Saul Brodsky Jewish Community Library and a storyteller herself.

Her answer: No current funds for anthologies.

Going back to the 1990s, Schwartz and Raznick co-edited nearly a half dozen issues of the “Sagarin Review,” as well as the “First Harvest” and “New Harvest” anthologies, all of poetry, fiction, life stories and essays written by Jews living in St. Louis or who formerly lived here. Brodsky library, which is registered as a press, published each volume.

Unfazed by Raznick’s response or the fact that Brodsky’s last anthology appeared in 2005, Kohn contacted another pal, Maurice (Bud) Hirsch, a former accounting teacher, avid horseman, photographer and published poet.

Not enough money to publish? We can raise it, Hirsch told Raznick.

And thanks to the several thousand dollars he collected, plus Kohn’s many nudges, a third volume, “Winter Harvest: Jewish Writing in St. Louis, 2006-2011,” will be publicly unveiled April 28.

Like Brodsky’s previous anthologies, this one is approximately 500 pages. The 93 contributors include Jason Sommer, Steven Schreiner, Henry Schvey, Jeff Friedman and Howard Schwartz.

Apparently no other Jewish library worldwide, according to Raznick, has published a similar volume of its community’s Jewish literary writers.

“Nudger” Kohn, who writes art and literary and art criticism, argues in his newly published essay that while no other critic seems to have suggested it, one character in Kate Chopin’s landmark feminist novella, “The Awakening” (1899), was a Jewish woman.

In his six poems in “Winter Harvest,” Maurice Hirsch writes on topics from examining burial plots by “lying on my back/as if I’m testing mattresses,” to waiting to learn whether a slum landlord finds he and his future wife, Marian, worthy “to rent his crumbling brick, rats-in-the-alley, third-floor walkup.”

In his new essay, “Sagarin Review” anthology regular Robert A. Cohn, editor-in-chief emeritus of the St. Louis Jewish Light, revisits the idea of author Philip Roth as stepfather, a topic he first considered some 35 years ago in the Light.

Some anthology contributors, including retired operating-room nurse Rita Horwitz, have never before been published outside their professions. In her “life story,” Horwitz recalls singing and dancing in the kitchen with her sister Phyllis on Dec. 8, 1941, when her father came in, “tears in his eyes,” to inform the family that the country was at war. “What is war, what is war,” she mused.

The new anthology’s youngest selected contributor, Jackie Schechter, 16, is a junior at MICDS (Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School). In one of her poems she bemusedly remembers her family’s ballpark ritual. “My dad held my mom’s peach colored hand/and tossed me his cap.”

Much too big and smelling of “cherry cough drops,” she writes, the cap “covered my eyes/until all I could see was/red, red, red.”

Contributor Elaine Alexander, who writes book reviews for the Light, notes that previously, she was most widely published in the Sears, Roebuck catalog, where she was a copywriter. In “Elegy for Isaac,” her poem in “Winter Harvest,” she writes of the isolation and loss of innocence of a child, made too soon a parent’s confidant.

Well-known area poet Marilyn Probe draws upon interviews she recorded and also memories she asked her mother, Edith Pearl Lena Harris Probe (1897-1984), to chronicle in an archival journal. The elder Probe, though shown off as the only Jewish girl at her grade school in Burlington, Iowa, left town with her family in 1903 because people would not patronize her father’s “‘Jew’ store.”

The new poems “make me appreciate my mother even more,” Marilyn Probe says.

While funding for future Brodksy anthologies remains uncertain, writers and other appreciators might take consolation in the new volume’s name: The co-editors have called it “Winter Harvest” and not “Final Harvest.”

‘Winter Harvest’

WHAT: Celebrating the publication of “Winter Harvest: Jewish Writing in St. Louis, 2006-2011.” A number of contributors will read brief excerpts.

WHEN: 7 p.m. April 28 at the Saul Brodsky Jewish Community Library in the Jewish Federation Kopolow Building

HOW MUCH: The purchase of one anthology per family for $15. Books will later sell at Brodsky library for $20 and eventually be available on amazon.com.

MORE INFO: RSVPs required to 314-442-3720, or [email protected]