Review of Montage: Works by Debora Vogel, trans. Lyubas

The title and poems of this volume, Montage, are taken from Vogel’s third and last book in Yiddish, Akatsies blien. Montazhn (The acacias bloom: montages; 1935); this is the only book she also published in Polish (Akacje kwitną. Montaże), a year later, in 1936. In these philosophical prose poems, Vogel continued to develop the concept of montage that was au courant in the interwar period. As Lyubas explains, she was, “inspired by the use of montage in film and photography, cubist collage, atonal music, and the genre of reportage at the intersection of literature and journalism.” ^{6 6} Anastasiya Lyubas, Montage: Works by Debora Vogel. White Goat Press, 2023, (Introduction). Various of these prose poems were published in the Inzikh journal in New York from 1936 to 1938.

For this new English edition of Vogel’s poetry, Lyubas has selected 25 poems out of the 51 from the original Yiddish version Akatsies blien. Montazhn and has displayed the poems in three sections in the following order: Flower Shops with Azaleas (1933), Acacias Bloom (1932), and Building of a Train Station (1931). In a footnote on Blooming Spaces, Lyubas notes how “the sequence of mini-collections in this translation (referring to Acacias Bloom prose poems) follows the reverse chronological order of the Polish original publication - from Flower Shops with Azaleas (1933), and Acacias Bloom (1932), to The Building of the Train Station (1931). The sequence in the Yiddish text is Chronological- the mini collection written in 1931 came first, while Flower Shops with Azaleas (1933) appeared last.” ^{7 7} Anastasiya Lyubas, Blooming Spaces: The Collected Poetry, Prose, Critical Writing, and Letters of Debora Vogel, Academic Studies Press, 2020. (p. 223). It is worth asking then: if this edition (Montage) should follow Vogel’s Yiddish version, why does the order follow the Polish version? Another difference this book presents from the Yiddish original is that the prose poems are presented in a poem format.

While the volume Blooming Spaces appears to have a more academic register, Montage, on the other hand, is targeted to a more general audience and treats the writing as an aesthetic accomplishment to be experienced rather than analyzed. Each poem is presented by itself with a blank page after each poem so as to grant a pause between them. The space granted to the poetry is significantly different not only from the critical translations of Blooming Spaces, but also from the Yiddish original: In Vogel’s Yiddish version, a prose poem is followed directly by another with hardly any space between them as if it were one long story. By way of contrast, Montage’s display of poems is set up to be read leisurely, without the background noise of the whens, the whys, and the wheres of each poem. And that is one of the merits of this volume: it gives room for the joy of reading the poem in and by itself.

Lyubas’s volume Montage opens with the poem “Streets and Sky” (the first poem of the third section in the Yiddish version), where the reader is immediately presented with Vogel’s world. Right from the very beginning, the reader encounters Vogel’s recurrent leitmotifs, such as longing, boredom, banal encounters, melancholy, the color grey, people, and streets. These key concepts ultimately tell the story of a life, the story of a fragmentation, of a montage where the form of the poem becomes the narrator and the subject matter is relegated to the background, as the verses are meant to convey a feeling, a color, a texture, a still image that captures the melody of life: a melody that “usually, (it) happens in November” as Vogel writes in the last poem of Montage. Lyubas’s expertise in the subject strengthens her hand in translating Vogel’s poetry after years of researching Vogel’s work.

As previously mentioned, one way that this new volume differs from Blooming Spaces is its emphasis on translating this book from the Yiddish original, and not the Polish version. As Lyubas explains in the introduction: “the intent of translations in this volume is to present Vogel’s voice in Yiddish and thus shed light on the author’s work in this language.” ^{8 8} Anastasiya Lyubas, Montage: Works by Debora Vogel. White Goat Press, 2023, (Introduction). The fact that Vogel chose to write in Yiddish, a language not spoken at her home and that Vogel learned as an adult instigated by the influence of Auerbach, would situate her in the avant-garde Yiddish poetry arena. Vogel lived in Lviv, Ukraine, for most of her adult life, and like many multilingual Jewish authors living in the city during the 1920s and 1930s, she explored the use of several languages, such as German, Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Vogel was fluent in most of these languages, as were other poets of the time. For Jewish writers to write in the language of their country of residence was common practice. However, political changes and the pogroms against Jews in Europe inadvertently encouraged resistance, with Jewish writers deploying Jewish languages like Hebrew and Yiddish to reclaim their Jewish identities. In returning to, and translating from, these Yiddish texts in particular, Lyubas elevates the importance of Vogel’s language activism and her esteem for the Yiddish language as a vehicle for her creative efforts.

In the poem “Flower Shops with Azaleas,” Lyubas gives us a new updated translation from the one published in her previous volume. In this new translation, the rhythm seems to flow more similarly to Vogel’s Yiddish verses as we can see in the following example: “In the blue-gray city of five million legs, there are shops/ with huge, flat, round flowers”. ^{9 9} Anastasiya Lyubas, Blooming Spaces: The Collected Poetry, Prose, Critical Writing, and Letters of Debora Vogel, Academic Studies Press, 2020. (p 230). In Lyubas’ previous translation she wrote “In the city of blue grayness and five million legs, there are also shops with huge, flat, spherical flowers.” Another example where we can observe such revisions that adhere more closely to the Yiddish rhythm can be found in the following verses: “And this thing that is happening/ here at the azalea shop actually resembles something long/known”; compared to the Blooming Spaces version “And this thing, which is taking place here at the azalea shop, in fact, completely resembles something known for a long time”. ^{10 10} Ibid (p. 231). Considering the importance of style and rhythm for Vogel, Lyuba’s new translation gives us a closer tam to Vogel’s Yiddish verses.

We can also find examples on how Lyubas has made Montages less academic and reflects on her decision to translate directly from Yiddish for this later volume. In Blooming Spaces Lyubas marks words from Vogel’s Polish version omitted in her Yiddish versions with italicization or through footnotes. For example, “The day is gray and sweet, one in a series of gray days. People search for hard objects to hold in their hands; they search for gray walls, and the walls of dazzling billboards, for distinct and unambiguous events.” ^{11 11} Ibid (p. 230). In Montage these more academic inserts are smoothed out, resulting in: “The day is gray, one in a series of gray days. People search/ for hard objects to hold in their hands, for distinct and/ unambiguous events” bringing this new translation closer to Vogel’s original Yiddish versions.

This translation, among many other translations and studies of women Yiddish writers, has helped reconstruct and claim an “authentic past” where women are included, as Irena Klepfisz has explained. ^{12 12} Irena Klepfisz. “Queens of Contradiction: A Feminist Introduction to Yiddish Women Writers.” Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Frieda Forman et al., Second Story Press, 1994, p 56.
Although many women writers made their entry into Yiddish literature through poetry, which was considered a more feminine genre than prose, their lack of representation points to their marginalization and the effective silencing of their voices. Recent studies and new translations of Yiddish women’s writing (by Norich, Kirzane, Gollance and Schachter, among others ^{13 13} Kadya Molodovsky’s A Jewish Refugee in America (translation by Anita Norich), Chana Blankshteyn’s Fear and other Stories (translation by Anita Norich), Miriam Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love, A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories and Judith: A Tale of Love & Woe (translation by Jessica Kirzane), Tea Arciszewska’s ‘Miryeml’ (translation by Sonia Gollance), Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 by Allison Schachter. ) focus on other genres in which women’s contributions had not previously been recognized – short stories, plays, and novels. This volume expands these genres to include the avant garde and underlines the point that literary modernism was a dialogue between men and women writers.