“Sutzkever”

Ezekiel Lifschutz’s diary from his time as YIVO chief archivist in the 1960s offers striking evidence of the institute’s importance in the wider Jewish world. In these passages, we see the personalities of three giants of modern Jewish literature — Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, English novelist Saul Bellow, and Hebrew writer Shai Agnon — and their relationships to the Yiddish language.

Rochelle Sibley writes about teaching Yiddish literature in translation at a university in the UK.

In this conversation the Yiddish translator John Karlsson from Sweden discusses his most recent project, a translation of Yosl Birshteyn stories into Swedish.

Goldie Morgentaler reflects on why her mother, the novelist Chava Rosenfarb, might have chosen to translate the work of two other Jewish Canadian women writers — her friends Miriam Waddington and Adele Wiseman, who both wrote in English — into Yiddish.