Jun 11, 2024
Cover of Translating Jewish Multilingualisms. https://journals.publishing.um…
In recent years, increasing awareness of the historical conditions of Jewish cultures has led many scholars to abandon national and monolingual frameworks and approach Jewish literatures as inherently multilingual, cross-cultural, and transnational. Jewish literatures historically relied on diasporic modes of circulation and exchange within interconnected deterritorialized formations that ceaselessly blurred linguistic, political, and cultural boundaries. Titled Translating Jewish Multilingualism, a new collection of literary translations published at the University of Michigan seeks to bring these insights into the work of translation, bringing together texts written by modern Jewish authors across the world in seven languages. The collection, edited by myself and Maya Barzilai, showcases the variety of genres and themes with which Jewish writers have expressed themselves within an open-ended framework that explores Jewish multilingualism in the modern world. 1 1 Translating Jewish Multilingualism is the 29th volume of Absinthe - World Literature in Translation. Absinthe Journal was founded in Farmington Hills, a suburb of Detroit, and it has been publishing works in translation since 2003. In 2014, it was relocated to the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Each year, students and faculty in the department work together to publish a volume of Absinthe dedicated each year to different cultures, languages, and themes. All volumes are available on the Absinthe website, and physical copies can be purchased on Amazon.
We chose to begin the volume with the words of Benjamin Harshav (1928-2015) who, in the opening to his 2007 collection of essays, The Polyphony of Jewish Culture, wrote that “modern Jewish culture speaks with many voices.” This multitude of voices is evident in Harshav’s own biography: born Binyamin Hrushovsky in what is now Lithuania, he was a native speaker of Yiddish, and when the Second World War displaced his family to the Urals, he completed his studies in Russian schools. In 1948 he immigrated to Israel and went on to teach in different American universities, studying Jewish literary history, writing poetry, and translating works between Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and German. Harshav’s own life, name, writing, and scholarship are emblematic of the multiple forces and layers shaping modern Jewish cultures.
The words of Harshav appeared to us as a fitting framing for Translating Jewish Multilingualism, and he is but one of the figures, texts, and traditions that course through the works in the volume. The multilingual narrative of Jewish modernity told through them—in Yiddish, Hebrew, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, and Czech—spans from the 1880s to the 2020s and ranges from Tel Aviv to São Paulo through Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Livorno, Warsaw, Prague, and Chicago. Each of its texts and contexts exhibit different aspects of the Jewish encounter with the conditions of modern society, exemplifying the ways in which Jewish writing engages and negotiates different cultures and traditions. Instead of focusing on disparate Jewish languages and histories in isolation, we wanted to bring them into conversation within an open-ended framework that explores Jewish multilingualism in the modern world. And, even within each text, there are evident traces of other languages and literary traditions, echoing an enduring intertwined legacy of translation and migration.
The earliest work in the issue is an 1884 essay by Shalom Bekache (1848–1927), whose list of credentials—rabbi, butcher, author, publisher—speaks to the multifarious nature of Jewish modernization. Born in Mumbai to a Baghdadi family and educated in Palestine, Bekache had lived most of his life as a colonial subject in the Maghreb, where he sought to instill the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment alongside adherence to Judaism through his Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic publications. Bekache’s essay, the preface to his collection The Harbinger of Good (Mevaser tov), translated from Judeo-Arabic by Avner Ofrath, explores the role of Jewish tradition in a modern world ruled by European colonial powers. Published a decade later, a Yiddish short story titled “A Modern Bride and Groom” (Haynt veltige khosen kalla) also deals with questions of gender and modernity. Written by Sara Familiant and translated by Anita Norich, the story depicts Gittel, a poor seamstress in late-nineteenth-century Poland struggling with new conceptions of love and marriage and their conflation with social class. Questions about modernity and its impact on the experience of Jewish women also echo in “The Meal before the Fast” (Se’uda mafseket), a short story written in Hebrew by Uri Nissan Gnessin (1879-1913) and published in Warsaw in 1905. Gnessin’s protagonist, also named Gittel, is a young Jewish woman living in a small town with her observant father and struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother. She yearns for the new possibilities afforded by emancipation and assimilation and dreams of life in a European city, but she finds herself deeply tied to her familial home and its traditional Jewish life. In my translation of Gnessin’s story, I sought to maintain the different rifts and ruptures that are thematized by the author in the plot and that characterize the text’s language and form in this early attempt to write modernist, stream-of-consciousness prose in Hebrew when it was not yet a widely spoken language.
A postcard illustrating a scene from a traditional Eastern European Jewish wedding. Printed in Krakow in 1902. Source: Jewish Heritage Collection, The Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan Library. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/s…
The modern fascination with and creative use of Jewish histories and traditions appears as a throughline across the works featured in the volume. The novella La Agua de la Sota, written in Ladino by Viktor Levi (1865-1940) and translated by Nesi Altaras, is set in biblical Jerusalem, in the time of King Solomon, an intriguing background used both to entice readers and to scantly veil a scathing critique of the religious establishment and the vulnerability of women in traditional Jewish society. Despite the ancient setting and the romantic, melodramatic plot, the novella evoked a powerful response from the establishment, and the chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire even declared that the book should be burned. Another set of Jewish traditions is thematized in “Holy Reb Velvele, the Brave Wolf from Zbaraz,” a short story published in Prague in 1937 by Czech author Jiří Mordechai Langer (1894–1943). According to Denisa Glacová, who translated the story from Czech, it is one of many works that Langer wrote in the distinctive style of the Hasidic tale, despite the fact that Prague Jews had very little contact with Hasidim during Langer’s lifetime. Nonetheless, the author was drawn to this movement and took on the persona of the Hasidic storyteller for his Czech readers, transporting them to the life of the Jewish shtetl shortly before its obliteration by the Nazis. Glacová’s translation rises to the challenge of the lively “skaz” style that Langer adopted in his own rendering of a Hasidic tale, rife with diminutives and approximating the cadence of spontaneous talk. Another form of engagement with Jewish histories and traditions is exhibited in the poems of Juan Gelman (1930-2014), translated by Ariana Afsari. Born in Argentina, Gelman wrote the poems included in the bilingual, Ladino-Spanish collection Dibaxu while he was in exile in Europe. His use of Ladino alongside its counterpart, Spanish, is striking given that he was the son of Jewish emigrants from Ukraine whose native language was presumably Yiddish. The Jewish poet’s turn to Ladino as a means to express his experience of exile blurs the linguistic and ethnic boundaries between Ashkenazim and Sephardim.
The inherent multilingualism of Jewish writing poses unique challenges to its translators. Throughout our work on Translating Jewish Multilingualism, we became intimately involved in parsing and mediating the linguistic conjunctions and entanglements that inform the texts. The presence of two closely related languages, as in the case of Gelman’s use of Spanish and Ladino, confronted us with the limits of translation, and we decided to present the poems of Dibaxu in trilingual form — Ladino, Spanish, and English. Another selection of poems, translated from the Yiddish by Jessica Kirzane, offers a glimpse of Jewish immigrant life in the American Midwest. The poetry of Chicago-based writers Pessie Hershfeld-Pomerants and Shloyme Shvarts is rooted in the urban and natural landscapes of Chicago and its environs. While the Yiddish poems bear the marks of English, Kirzane skillfully inscribes her English translations with Yiddish. Such a gesture appears, for example, in the final verses of Hershfeld’s poem “At a Symphony Concert”: “The cymbals crash—too late, tsu shpet.” The translation therefore disallows a “fluent” English reading, resisting the subsumption of Jewish works written “By the Waters of Michigan,” as one of the poems is titled, into their American-English surroundings.
A photograph of Primeira Quadra in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, circa 1911. Acervo do Arquivo Histórico Municipal de Santa Maria. Reproduced in Júlia Irion Martins’ translation of Frida Alexandr, Filipson: Memories of the First Jewish Colony in Rio Grande do Sul. https://doi.org/10.3998/absinthe.5076
The enduring presence of Jewish languages in immigrant writing cuts across several of the works in Translating Jewish Multilingualism. In Filipson: Memories of the First Jewish Colony in Rio Grande do Sul, translated by Júlia Irion Martins, Brazilian Jewish author Frida Alexandr (1906–1972) recounts her childhood in a rural farming community founded by the Jewish Colonization Association. Written in Portuguese, Alexandr’s memoir is shot through with traces of Yiddish, her parents’ language, used to denote communal and familial relations and, at times, emphasize moments of intimacy and care. The polyphony brought about by the conjunction of migration and translation is also reflected in the short stories of Rita Kogan (b. 1976), translated into English by Yardenne Greenspan. Kogan, who is based in Tel Aviv and writes primarily in Hebrew, was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to Israel at age fourteen. Titled “Stoneland” and “The Third Sin,” the stories recount coming-of-age in the Soviet Union, a Russian-speaking sphere described by Kogan in her adopted language, Hebrew, but they are marked by another language—and another culture—that persist in the immigrant’s mind. Traces of Jewish diasporic life also reverberate in a short text by Hezy Leskly (1952–1994), an Israeli poet born to Czech-Jewish Holocaust survivors. In his enigmatic text “The Rift” (“Ha-shever”), translated from Hebrew by Adriana X. Jacobs, Leskly adopts the pseudonymous persona of a fictional Czech poet. The eponymous “Rift” can be read as a reflection on the different fractures in the author’s biography, familial history, and writing practice. A meditation on fractures and rifts further emerges in “Win or Lose,” an excerpt from an autobiographical novel by Yossi Sucary (b. 1959), translated from Hebrew by Maya Barzilai and Ruth Tsoffar. Through the figure of his grandmother, Emilia, a Holocaust survivor who was born in Libya and immigrated to Israel, Sucary calls attention to the fault lines of Israel’s “melting pot” ideology and the marginalization of Mizrahim.
The work of collecting, translating, and editing literary texts for Translating Jewish Multilingualism provided me with an opportunity to reflect on the significance of multilingualism and translation in my own experience of migration. Any immigrant and anyone who grew up in an immigrant family can recall moving within and between languages and harboring different mixtures—or mishmash—that such conditions often produce. Growing up in Israel as an immigrant from the Soviet Union, my parents and I communicated with a mix of Russian and Hebrew that I always thought was broken and laughable: a “pidgin Russian,” if you will. A few years ago, I was asked by In geveb to conduct an interview with Sarah Bunin Benor about the Jewish Language Project. As I explored the Project’s website, I discovered that one of the “languages” documented and detailed in it is “Jewish Russian.” The language I thought of as a broken, degraded divergence from “proper” Russian, forced into existence by migration and assimilation, was recognized and studied for its cultural and historical value. This realization transformed not only my conception of the language but also how I felt while speaking and corresponding with it. Migration—of people, texts, and ideas— fosters zones of contact and fusion where different languages, cultures, and fluencies commingle to create hybrids of Hebrew and Russian, Ladino and Spanish, Portuguese and Yiddish, deployed in various contexts, from the most intimate domestic spheres to literature and mass media. Translating Jewish Multilingualism is a collaborative effort to curate the hybridity and diversity of Jewish writing and to foreground translation as a productive and creative object of study and way of life.
