Translating Israeli Literature into Hebrew - Where Yiddish Meets the Land

Growing up, one of my favorite songs was “Sir Moses Montefiore,” a classic Israeli song written by Haim Hefer and performed by the famous singer Yehoram Gaon in 1971. Moses Montefiore, a well-known nineteenth-century Jewish philanthropist, is portrayed in this song as defying death. He repeatedly refuses to join the angels who wish to take him away, insisting on doing yet another good deed for the benefit of the Jewish people. After each encounter with the angels, Montefiore joyfully jumps onto his famous carriage and shouts “diyo” (Giddy up!), quickly heading off on a new adventure. The image of Montefiore in his carriage enchanted me. I loved imagining him flying through the streets, cheered by “all the Jews,” as the song says. It wasn’t only the man who captured my imagination; it was the magical carriage that swiftly took him to any place around the globe. Even now, years later, when I am less sentimental about the song, I still find myself humming it and thinking about the mystical carriage.

Although I have grown more skeptical of this saccharine presentation of Montefiore, when I read Rikuda Potash’s “The Carriage” the story intervened to reveal this profound Israeli myth to me from a very different point of view. I learned to appreciate a different sort of magic — the magic of seeing the unseen and giving life to a still object, the magic of telling one’s own story.

Before the Montefiore song was written and composed, his carriage had long been a forgotten artifact. Although some people struggled to save the carriage and bring it to Palestine in 1909, it ended up sitting in the Bezalel School of Art’s yard for years, neglected and unseen: a carriage with a glorious history but no real future. No one paid attention to it except for the Yiddish poet Rikuda Potash, who happened to work as a librarian at the school. As she viewed the carriage through the window, she adopted the carriage’s point of view and wrote about it from the perspective of looking through its eyes and witnessing all it saw: changes in seasons, couples hiding from the public eye, people breaking down, shedding tears — things one can only see when one pays attention. Potash did not see the carriage as an abandoned rotten wooden vessel. She saw in it a natural process of regrowth — new stories and memories could be associated with this prestigious carriage. In her story, Potash depicts this process by writing about a tree growing right through the beams of the old carriage, giving her and the carriage a new form of life in the shape of a story and a storyteller.

Potash’s story opens “Where the Sky and the Sea Meet,” an anthology of what is declared in the sub-title as “Israeli Yiddish Stories.” The anthology, which includes twenty-two stories by ten different writers, can be seen as a continuation of what is portrayed in Potash’s story in that it tells the stories of people and things that are often overlooked. Like Potash, Malasha Mali’s main character stands by her window yearning to be seen, a yearning that appears on canvas in a painting of the curtain set on fire. Yossel Birstein’s characters are fighting their own death and their struggles, too, are unnoticed, whether it is an elderly man who was declared dead by the post office after a letter that was sent to him was returned to its sender, a woman wandering in the streets of Ra’anana carrying her dead baby in her arms, or a Palestinian man in an unfortunate encounter with an Israeli officer. Likewise, Mendel Man challenges the readers to listen to voices that tell the story of previous land inhabitants who are no longer present. In Avrom Sutzkever’s “The Twins,” a Holocaust survivor in search of lost memories is prompted to tell her story, and memories of old dreams of the Jewish state make their way to print in Avrom Karpilovich’s stories.

But maybe the main turn to the unseen comes not from the writers but from the translators. Although some of the writers showcased in the book have already made a name for themselves in Hebrew culture, some haven’t become well known in Yiddish. Translating and introducing these stories to a new community is a continuation of the stories’ effort to tell hidden narratives. Thus, the translators — active figures in both the scholarly and literary Yiddish world, particularly in the Israeli context — manage to place the Yiddish narratives in the broader Israeli Hebrew story.

Though one can find a thematic thread weaving through the different stories, what really characterizes the book is its diversity: an assortment of brief glimpses into Israeli culture through the eyes of various Yiddish writers. Shachar Pinsker states in the introduction that there was no guiding principle for deciding which stories or authors should be translated. Instead, they were chosen by translators mainly based on their personal preferences. This makes for an eclectic anthology. Some stories deal with the past, and some look to the future. Some are set in the north of Israel, some in Tel Aviv or Jaffa, and some in Jerusalem. Although these differences can be attributed to the nature of Israeli Yiddish literature, which is often assumed to lack a uniting style and theme, in this anthology, it is a result of the variety of tastes among the translators. And it is a good result.

The pieces presented in this anthology do not tell the whole story of Yiddish in Israel, as anthologies scarcely can and seldom do. Rather, the selections allow the translators to open a small window to stories that have touched them as Yiddish readers, as scholars, and as Israelis. They are an invitation to reexamine what Israeli literature is: to expand the category of Israeli literature beyond just the Hebrew language and in so doing to disrupt expectations about that literature. The translation styles in the anthology vary, but they tend towards the literal, sometimes at the cost of idiomaticity. The unnatural quality of the translations further invites the reader to question what is natural in Israeli culture.

Multiple references to the Palestinian people, villages, and heritage that are no longer present are scattered throughout the anthology. Additionally, one can find novel human-nonhuman relationships like in Yeshaye Shpigl’s stories or different representations of language and its cultural roles, such as in Rokhl Auerbakh’s “The Lullaby.” The book’s subtitle does not hesitate to call these stories “Israeli stories in Yiddish,” as if answering a hidden question of whether Israeli literature must be in Hebrew. However, the title is misleading as the stories — now translated — are no longer in Yiddish but Hebrew! I suggest that what makes these stories Israeli at this moment is the very fact that they are now in Hebrew and can be offered to the Hebrew reader as a means of self-reflection. One question that occurred to me when reading such stories is how they are transformed through translation given the extralinguistic meanings that Yiddish and Hebrew bear within Jewish cultures. I was wondering whether questions about the cultural roles of language can themselves come across in Hebrew translation, or whether conversations about the meaning of language itself are necessarily somewhat lost or transformed in translation.

Reading these stories won’t lead to the answers to all questions. However, one can undoubtedly find fresh points of view, as in the case of “Montefiore’s Carriage”. Potash does not replace the myth invoked by the popular song about a glorified past. Instead, she offers the reader a narrative that seems unaware of this now-popular understanding of Montefiore and his carriage — one in which the carriage itself has been abandoned — and therefore her narrative is free to expose new angles and experiences. It is hard to draw broad conclusions by reading a single anthology, but the experience of reading this volume suggests that such questions remain provocative in translation and create new avenues for Hebrew readers to think about difficult topics.

To conclude, I want to allude to Tsvi Eisenman’s story, which lends its title to the anthology. In an old Arab house in Jaffa lives a family and the little child Mendele. The house is very dark, and a shadow-like entity accompanies the family. This void intensifies once the father leaves the house and never returns. Mendele, seeing things change in the house, witnessing things he wished he hadn’t seen, and longing to reunite with his father, escapes to the beach, hoping to one day reach the horizon — where the sea and the sky meet. Perhaps that horizon is the translation line where Yiddish and Hebrew meet, where abandoned pasts return to meet the present moment. To get there, we – Israelis, Hebrew readers, and Yiddish readers too – can hope to escape and long for something different.