Memoir (excerpt) | Poland | United States | Yiddish
February, 2019Di vos zaynen nisht geblibn: dertseylungen (Those Who Didn’t Survive: Stories) (New York and Tel Aviv, 1972) is a memoir by Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974) of his shtetl Skarżysko-Kamienna, Poland, as refracted through the figure of his great-uncle Reb Mendl Feldman. Bryks presents the shtetl’s folk traditions and an extended cast of characters, while always deftly returning the thread to Reb Mendl. In the process, a vivid collective portrait of an annihilated Jewish community emerges. His approach is unconventional—there are no chapter breaks or readily apparent chronology. The book is more a panorama chock full of anecdotes, customs, details, and personalities than a traditional memoir with a linear narrative drive. Known widely for his pioneering use of dark humor in his Holocaust fiction, Bryks’ non-fiction displays his powers of description and empathic observations. In this excerpt, we meet two of the shtetl’s particularly colorful characters. Those Who Didn’t Survive is one of three memoirs by Rachmil Bryks I am translating as a 2018-2019 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. I thank Bella Bryks-Klein for her enthusiastic support of this translation project; the Yiddish Book Center and all of the program’s staff, fellows, and instructors; my mentor Elizabeth Harris; Justin Cammy for his feedback; and Ri J. Turner for her assistance with the translation of some challenging Yiddish words and expressions.
- Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Poetry (excerpts) | Ukraine | Yiddish
March, 2018The poems featured here are excerpts from Debora Vogel’s collection Day Figures (1930), comprised of 68 poems in total, arranged into four smaller collections: Rectangles (1924), Houses and Streets (1926), Weary Dresses (1925-1929), and Tin (1929).
The difficulty in translating these pieces lies in the fact that Vogel’s idiom is visual--she “paints” for her reader in a manner similar to Picasso, El Lissitzky, or Fernand Leger. Her cityscapes are filled with geometrical figures, colors, and numbers that are frequently repeated. Repetition, stark minimalism in vocabulary, and experimentation with syntax and punctuation are distinctive qualities of Vogel’s style.
At times certain words are repeated incessantly (“sticky,” “renunciation”), the reiteration of word combinations is identical (“sticky smell”), at other times these are slightly transformed syntactically, to underscore the significance of changes that occur even with the slightest modifications. This poses a challenge, since Vogel insists on a certain glossary that does not always allow for diversification. The synonyms, especially for adjectives in epithets, need to be chosen carefully: they cannot be too extravagant, and have to be limited. The approach to punctuation has to be balanced. At times the punctuation needs to be domesticated, at other times preserved, in order to keep the strangeness of the text. Vogel utilizes the colon in a different way than is accepted in English usage; the period is used when you might prefer a comma; and the comma is used when you would logically expect a period. Some punctuation marks, such as question marks, are absent. The word order needs to be rearranged at times, to reflect the English word order of a sentence, with the subject being in the first position, the verb in the second. Vogel’s articles in Yiddish do not always make sense in English, so I worked on them as well.
- Anastasiya Lyubas
Israel | Poetry (excerpts) | Yiddish
July, 2017The following poems are taken from the expanded edition of Abraham Sutzkever’s collection Poems from My Diary, which was published in 1985. Considered his masterpiece, the poems in this collection range from musings on Sutzkever’s daily life in Israel and memories of life in Vilna, to highly imaginative lyrics. They are much like what they sound like they would be from their title, while they are also much more.
- Maia Evrona
Galicia/United States | Short Fiction | Yiddish
April, 2016Blume Lempel’s work is noteworthy for its unflinching examination of erotic themes and gender relations, its psychological acuity, and its technical virtuosity. Mirroring the dislocation of her women protagonists, her stories move between present and past, Old World and New, dream and reality. Lempel did not hesitate to take up subjects only rarely explored by writers in Yiddish--including incest, abortion, feminism, and madness. This story--the tale of a blind date--is no exception.
In “The Little Red Umbrella,” Janet Silver accepts an invitation from an eccentric poet who was badly disfigured during the Holocaust. We learn of the erotic imaginings of this middle-aged woman, her preparations for the date, her flustered travel to meet the unknown poet, and finally, the awkward, challenging, and combative nature of the date itself. In the end, Janet finds herself feeling an unexpected compassion for her new acquaintance.
- Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Poetry | United States | Yiddish
February, 2015These five translations are all taken from Anna Margolin's first and only book of poetry, published in 1929 and simply titled Lider, which means both "poems" and "songs" in Yiddish. While this book was well received by Yiddish readers and critics, following its publication Anna Margolin stopped publishing poetry and eventually became a recluse. Nevertheless, Lider has gone on to become a classic of Yiddish-language literature, with some of its poems even being set to music.
- Maia Evrona
Israel | Poetry (excerpts) | Yiddish
April, 2014Though Abraham Sutzkever is largely known for the poems he wrote during the Holocaust, Yiddish readers and experts consider the collection Poems from My Diary, which was published in 1977 as a collection of roughly 75 poems but later expanded to around 190 in the 1985 volume Twin Brother, to be his masterpiece. These poems range from musings on his daily life in Israel and memories of life in Vilna, to highly imaginative lyrics. They are much like what they sound like they would be from their title, while they are also much more: unlike diary entries, they are polished and mature. Most of the poems in the volume are sixteen lines long, divided into four quatrains--though there are exceptions, such as the collection's most famous poem "Who Will Remain, What Will Remain." Poems from My Diary is a remarkably consistent collection--it led to Sutzkever being awarded the Israel Prize in 1985, the only time the prize has been awarded for original literature written in Yiddish rather than Hebrew.
- Maia Evrona
Avrom Sutzkever, who died on January 20, 2010 at the age of 96, was the greatest postwar Yiddish poet, a prophetic survivor whose fate paralleled the tragedies and joys of Jews in the twentieth century. Raised in the brief but intense literary flowering of Vilna, he melted the printing plates of the city's most famous press into bullets for the guns of ghetto fighters. He witnessed the ghetto's destruction, helped to salvage the remains of the city's Jewish treasures, testified at Nuremberg, and immigrated to Israel, where he was at the center of rapidly waning high Yiddish literary culture. He founded and edited for some four decades the premier Yiddish literary magazine, Di Goldene Keyt. His poems depict his life not autobiographically, but auto-epically.
The dove of the Ode serves as a spiritual mentor to the boy-poet. The poem ends with the impassioned declaration of a secular-literary neomessianist: "Build, build the temple, build it with the sense of the sun!" It is a measure of the complexity of Sutzkever's Jewish poetics that he calls it a templ (a rarely used word in Yiddish), not a beyt-hamikdash. The third temple will be nothing at all like the first two.
Boris Karloff is the pen name of Dov-Ber Kerler, the polylingual and peripatetic son of the refusenik Yiddish poet Yosef Kerler. The two Kerlers are probably the only father-son team in postwar Yiddish poetry. The younger Kerler is known for his poetic and Yiddishist heterodoxy, his wit, and his openness to young talent. He is a scholar of Yiddish literary history at Indiana University.
Yonia Fain's odyssey is also emblematic of recent Jewish history. Born in Russia in 1914, he fled to Vilna, where he studied art and decided to be a painter. In 1939, the Soviets occupied the city; he fled again to Warsaw but was captured and imprisoned by the Soviets. He escaped to Japan via Siberia in 1941; the Japanese deported him to Shanghai, where he spent the rest of the war. After liberation he went to Mexico City, where he worked on murals with Diego Rivera. He has lived and painted in New York since 1953, publishing two books of poetry (the latest in 2008) and one book of short stories. His preoccupations are bleak and unsparing but offer the possibility of resurrection.
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