He began to write short stories in Yiddish following his father's death in 1991, and published four collections in book form under the nom de plume (Yiddish: —Hirshe-Dovid Meynkes): Eldra Don, 1992; The Flat Peak, 1993; Tales of the Misnagdim from Vilna Province, 1996; Einstein from Svir and Other Yiddish Short Stories, 2020. After experimenting with modern themes in the 1990s, he abandoned them for the vanished life of old Jewish Lithuania, to some extent violating norms of modern Yiddish to write works set in older Jewish Lithuania in local dialect. Awards for his fiction came from within the secular Yiddish environment: the Hirsh Rosenfeld Award (Canadian Jewish Congress, 1994), the Zhitlovsky Prize (Ikuf, 1996) the Itzik Manger Prize, in 1997, and the Leyb Rubinlicht Award (Leyvik House, 2020). In 1994 he founded at Oxford the then sole literary monthly magazine in Yiddish, "Yiddish Pen"https://www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/dovid_periodicals.htm#YP "Yiddish Pen" and edited its first 27 issues.See: https://www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/dovid_periodicals.htm It did not, however, usher in the literary revival he had hoped for, and his own works of fiction received little recognition outside the narrow world of secular Yiddish culture. Still, translated anthologies of his short stories appeared in 2012, in EnglishCity in the Moonlight: Stories of the Old-time Lithuanian Jews. Yiddish stories by Dovid Katz. Selected and translated by Barnett Zumoff. Ktav: New York 2012 and in German,Ostjüdische Geschichten aus dem alten Litauen. Yiddish stories by Dovid Katz. Selected and translated by Melitta Depner. Salon: München 2012. but received little critical attention. In 2001-2002 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Yiddish literature.
