Alumni Profile: Sebastian Schulman

One day not long after he began working at the Yiddish Book Center, Sebastian Schulman went into the Center’s basement to look for the application he’d submitted in 2004 for what was then its summer internship program.

“Where do you see yourself in ten years?” the application had asked.

His answer: “I want to be involved in translation of Jewish literature.”

As it turns out, it took less than ten years for him to realize his aspiration. In 2012, Schulman came to the Yiddish Book Center to head its translation program, a multi-pronged initiative to open the richness of Yiddish literature to English-speaking readers. At the time, more than 98 percent of Yiddish literature was believed to be untranslated and therefore inaccessible to English readers.

Schulman grew up in New York’s Westchester County, in a family that he describes as strongly Jewish in sensibility but not in practice; they didn’t express their Jewishness in ways that felt tangible to him, such as observing holidays, he says.

For years, Schulman says, he searched for a meaningful personal connection to his Jewishness. After high school, he headed off to a yearlong program in Israel but had to return home after just two months, because of the 9/11 attacks. In college, at Montreal’s McGill University, he studied Hebrew and went to Hillel but, he says, “nothing really clicked.”

Then one day he saw a flyer on a bulletin board at school for a summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center. The program—the precursor to what is now known as the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program—offered college students the chance to study Yiddish in the morning and work in the Center’s warehouse in the afternoon, “shlepping and sorting books and records,” he says.

The heat of the warehouse notwithstanding, “I had an incredible summer,” Schulman continues. On field trips to New York and Montreal, he was able to experience vibrant Yiddish communities; in literature classes taught by Smith College professor Justin Cammy he became engrossed by the complex poetry the students were asked to puzzle their way through.

By summer’s end, Schulman says, “I really felt like I’d seen every Yiddish book, ttouched every Yiddish book.” He’d also found the connection he’d been seeking to his Jewishness: Yiddish. Back in Montreal that fall, he continued his Yiddish studies and became involved in the city’s secular Yiddish-speaking community. “Yiddish filled in all these gaps, the texture and the meaning behind all these things,” he says. “This is where I came from. … Once I learned Yiddish, I felt comfortable in all these Jewish contexts. I felt I fit in as a Jew.”

While Yiddish is often seen as a dying language, a vestige of a bygone world that lives on mainly in academia, for Schulman it’s always felt vibrant, even forward-thinking. “Every Yiddish experience I’ve had, it hasn’t felt antiquated—it’s felt very real and alive,” he says—from his internship at the Center to a post-college summer studying at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in Lithuania, the former “heartland of Yiddish.” Later, he did Jewish cultural revival work in Moldova, where Yiddish is still widely spoken in some Jewish communities—a “living Yiddish context,” as he puts it.

For Schulman, “Yiddish is a means, not an end. It’s opened up a whole world,” both personally and professionally. In fact, he first met his wife, Asya Vaisman Schulman, now director of the Center’s Yiddish Language Institute, at an event for young people interested in Yiddish, and they’re now raising their young daughter to speak the language, along with English and Russian. As the Yiddish Book Center’s translation program specialist (a position he left last year to complete his dissertation), Schulman worked to open the world of Yiddish literature to new readers.

The program includes a yearlong fellowship 
where emerging translators receive mentorship and other support; taytsh.org, a web resource for working translators; and an annual digital translation issue 
of the Center’s magazine, Pakn Treger, with newly 
translated Yiddish works (many produced by those translation fellows). The Center has also focused on publishing new English translations 
of Yiddish books, first through its New Yiddish Library series with Yale University Press and now 
through the Yiddish Book Center Translation Series, in which the Center will represent selected 
translators with completed works in their dealings with potential print and online publishing partners.

Schulman took his first class in literary translation in graduate school “for fun,” he says. By semester’s end, he’d published translations of two stories by the Moldovan Yiddish writer Yekhiel Shraybman and, he says, had “fallen in love” with the discipline. In a twist on the trope of the cobbler’s children 
going barefoot, Schulman’s work on the Center’s translation initiative (and, it should be said, his work finishing his doctorate in history) left him little time to do much translating himself. But that’s a small (and, it’s hoped, temporary) price to pay for what he calls the “vitally important project” of opening Yiddish literature to more readers.

“It’s a great literature, and it belongs to the world,” Schulman says. “Of course there’s so much in Yiddish literature that speaks to Jewish readers.” But beyond that, it deserves to be recognized as a world literature, to claim its place not just in publications focused on Yiddish or Jewish literature but also in general-interest literary journals. “It has tremendous potential,” Schulman says.

So too does the Center’s translation initiative. Schulman is particularly excited about the Yiddish Book Center Translation Series. While the New Yiddish Library saw the publication of ten highly acclaimed works, the project proved costly and time-consuming. The new publishing venture has a broader reach: translators will pitch already completed works to the Center, which will lead to a more diverse list of titles, and the Center will work with Deborah Harris, a noted literary agent in Israel, and a number of publishing houses to find the appropriate home for each book.

“It’s really democratizing the process,” Schulman says. “It’s so important to reach that broader audience.

“This literature needs to get out there. And now there’s no reason for it not to get out there.”

—Maureen Turner

This article first appeared in Pakn Treger #71, Summer 2015.