Jewish culture has its origins primarily in religious works such as the Tanach, midrash, Talmud and Kabbalistic works and the rest of the rabbinic literature written in Hebrew and Aramaic. The world literature of Ashkenazi Jews is written in Yiddish, a mixture of German with words from Hebrew and with some Romanisms and Slavisms. Modern literature in Yiddish has produced a number of prolific authors, starting with the classic trio (Sholem Aleichem, Moykher Sforim and Isaac Leib Peretz) to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. The mentioned literature flourished among Jews in the territory of the former Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary; that area, the so-called Yiddishland, where Yiddish was spoken and nurtured, i.e. from today's Estonia to the European part of Russia, western Ukraine and Romania, Slovakia and Poland. Many cities had their own significance for Jewish culture: the Lithuanian capital Vilnius was known as the Jerusalem of the North, and the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi was remembered for the conference where Yiddish was declared the national language of the Jews, and quite a few Belarusian cities were predominantly Jewish until the Second World War. After a brief overview of the development of the history of Yiddish literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, we will look at the anthological themes of certain authors. Some wrote satires inspired by historical themes from the Middle Ages, some by themes from the Bible and post-biblical literature, and some by contemporary themes, primarily about life in the shtetl, suffering pogroms and the consequences they experienced during and after the Holocaust. At the end, looking at selected topics from each author, the significance of modern literature in Yiddish for Jewish culture will be reviewed.