The 2087th Question or When Silence Is the Only Answer

Saulė Valiūnaitė offers a glimpse into the storied Velfke’s restaurant, a gathering place for Yiddish writers, actors, and artists in interwar Vilne.

Jan 21, 2020

This 1939 article and photograph in a Warsaw Yiddish weekly — depicting “a typical female cocaine addict [kokainistke] with a crazed expression in the eyes,” according to the caption — point to the spread of recreational drug use within the Jewish community and its emergence as a subject of interest in the Yiddish press.

Jan 10, 2020

Is there a more extraordinary and self-lacerating letter in all of Yiddish literature than this airmail from its most beloved poet to its most celebrated novelist?

Dec 18, 2019

The contributions of this special issue showcase the performative dimension of translation: Musicians and poets (when reading their texts) draw attention to the interactions between languages, phonetic experiences, rhythm, rhyme, and the productive use of misunderstandings. Critical reflections on their own translations, and the role performed by agents such as editors (e.g. of selection and design), engender the question of what it meant historically and what it means today to be a writer or reader in multilingual settings.

Dec 16, 2019

As a composer and performer of Yiddish music, Rosen confronts the fact that most members of my audience do not understand the language of the texts he performs. Yet, while music does not communicate information in the same way as language, it can lead listeners towards specific associations and meanings. There are multiple instances in which translation, imagined or guided, takes place during a musical performance and the composer and performer mediates these processes.

Dec 16, 2019

How the poet Louis Zukofsky constructed his English-language American modernism by citing, translating, and adapting the Yiddish poetry of Yehoash.

Dec 16, 2019

Radosav discusses her experiences as a translator of Yiddish poetry into Romanian and her evaluation of certain translations from other languages into Romanian or from Romanian into Yiddish. The essay outlines a strategy of “translation-recreation,” in which the translator balances a sense of fidelity to the source text with the attempt to creatively reproduce its internal mechanism.

Dec 16, 2019