Alumni Memories

To celebrate the Yiddish Book Center’s 40th anniversary in 2020, we’re looking back at the Yiddish Book Center’s storied history. As part of this effort, we’ve been asking our members and friends, including our alumni community, to share their memories of the Yiddish Book Center—favorite memories, funny memories, memories of the epic or the everyday. We're featuring a few of those memories here, and, if you haven't done so already, we'd love to encourage you to share your own.

Learn more about the Memories Project and submit your own memories of the Center.

Leah Berkowitz (TENT: Children's Literature '17)

I wrote my first short story lying on the carpet in the lobby of the Yiddish Book Center during the Jewish Creativity Conference for College Students in 2002. I remember being so delighted that this opportunity was given to me, and my college roommate, at pretty much no cost. I met wonderful people, and developed a passion for writing and storytelling that continues to this day.

Ellen Cassedy (Translation Fellowship '15)

As we sat around the table in our translation workshop in March of 2015, sheets of gorgeous snow were falling on the apple trees visible out the window.

"It's so beautiful!" I said rapturously to the Yiddish Book Center staffer sitting near me.

She fixed me with a murderous glare. "We're REALLY SICK of the snow," she said.

Jessica Kirzane (Yiddish Book Center Internship, now Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, '07; Translation Fellowship '17; Yiddish Pedagogy Program '18)

The Yiddish Book Center is where I first learned Yiddish, and it has supported me throughout my career. When I saw the call for memories I took a dive into some old emails and photos that might be of interest.

This is an excerpt from an email dated June 17, 2007, to Rita Ottens, with whom I had taken a course on German Jewish culture at the University of Virginia the previous year.

"I am writing to you from Amherst, where I have just finished my second week at the National Yiddish Book Center. I am really enjoying my time here—I am slowly but surely picking up some Yiddish and have attended lectures on topics ranging to the difficulties of translation, to the gendered nature of Yiddish, to urban Polish Jewry in the late 1800s. In the afternoons all 18 interns pile into vans and head out to the warehouse where many of the books are currently stored. We sort and pack the books, which are being moved this year into a cold storage facility. Working with the books gives us an opportunity to have a better sense of the breadth of Yiddish literature—we've seen children's books, plays, poems, translations of Dr. Zhivago, Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe. As we learn to read more Yiddish we are able to open up the books and try to understand what is written inside, which is exciting.

A group of interns has started trying to translate a play by Lieb Malchas called Ibergus, which is about the Jewish community in Argentina's combat against prostitution rings. It is slow going—so far we have only translated the character descriptions and the exposition before the actual lines of the play begin, but it is exciting to have gotten that far. All of the interns live together in college dorms. We cook together, do homework together, walk to the nearest town (4.5 miles away) together. We are already close friends, and I think that this will become more of a language immersion experience as we learn more Yiddish and have an opportunity to speak to each other in Yiddish even outside of the classroom."

This one, also to Rita Ottens, is dated July 20, 2007:

"The Book Center internship ends next week, and things are sort of winding down here. Our professor for this week, David Shneer, has been wonderful, and I'm excited to see what our professor for next week, Sam Kassow, will share with us. My Yiddish itself has improved by leaps and bounds - I am still a beginner, but I feel much more comfortable with the language than I did at the beginning of the program. My knowledge of Yiddish culture has also increased vastly and I am excited to come back to UVA and put to use all of my new knowledge."

This is a photo from August 13, 2018 of me with Sonia Gollance at the pedagogy program. Sonia and I began studying Yiddish together at the Steiner program eleven years prior to this photo and have remained friends ever since and supported each other along the way. It was so meaningful to find ourselves back at the Center together all those years later, learning to teach the language we first learned to speak there.

In this picture from July 2007, Sonia Gollance (a Steiner intern) pretends to be a Yiddish teacher during a comedic skit for the talent show at the end of the internship.

Cheyenne McClain (TENT: Creative Writing '13)

I was accepted to TENT: Creative Writing in 2013 for the program that coming June and had no idea what to expect. It was a brand new program but I had wanted to spend time at the Yiddish Book Center since first visiting Amherst many years before.

The mix of attendees who became my friends colleagues overwhelmed me at first; with their talent, energy, youth—Jewish excitement under and over it all. They still amaze me. We slept in dorms, ate breakfast together in our makeshift cafeteria, and had plenty of alone time.

I was treated to a better time than I had been in years. Deep conversations, late night stage readings, making friends over books and food, time in the apple orchard, for me, alone in the Library of Yiddish Children’s Literature. A beautiful Shabbat together.

We were given the gift of working intensively with two authors: Eileen Pollack, who worked critically with my small group, and Ehud Havazelet, now of blessed memory. This along with countless others in the industry—publishers, archivists, and Yiddish activists. At the head was our fearless leader—educator Josh Lambert, who brought us together and provided a magic anchor throughout (hint: Philip Roth was a common tie) that made our whole week that island in time. (Yiddish Book Center staff Gretchen was the first person I heard from and was there morning/noon/night—often early to rise and last to leave).

I have been fortunate to visit the Yiddish Book Center since, to speak to Aaron Lansky at other events and make time for other alumni who have become a part of my life. The magic of this week will never be recreated, but fortunately it has been captured. By the experiences of about 20 young writers, undoubtedly forming the direction our lives have taken these last 7 years. Some I have not heard from; others are Jewish professionals or Rabbinical students, world travelers and Broadway stars, small business owners and human rights activists, and of course journalists and published authors. Many who still share a deep love of Yiddish: that includes myself as well.

To be welcomed by that group, and now the larger TENT alumni community (Comics, etc.), I have found a home base at the Yiddish Book Center, and with members of my arts family all over the world!

Janine Jankovitz Pastor (TENT: Creative Writing '13)

Neil Rubin (Great Jewish Books Teacher Summer Seminar '19)

While the people I met were fantastic, bright and remarkably thoughtful and perceptive, I have a simple memory than the many outstanding conversations we had. Many afternoons, after lunch I would go sit in the apple orchard behind the center, lean back on a wooden chair that was strategically positioned under the shade of an apple tree (or move said chair). Then I would open some text, pen in my right hand and start reading. But soon, my mind would wander as I heard birds chirping and saw shadows getting longer. I found myself transformed into an orchard surrounding a village of long ago—albeit one bereft of marauding Cossacks and despicable sanitary conditions. Then I would place my eyes back on the page in front of me and truly read, read the way it was meant to be understood—with my head in the context of time and place. So when I think of the Yiddish Book Center, I think of the closest I will come to the most remarkably literary period in the history of Ashkenazi Jewry—something of which whose legacy I hope to have gained the moniker of being a descendant.