Alumni Q&A: Zissel (Chloë) Piazza

Translation Fellow Zissel Piazza Talks With Di feder

 Zissel (Chloë) Piazza is a 2018 Translation Fellowship alum and a 2019 Yiddish Pedagogy Program alum, as well as a doctoral student in Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, with designated emphases in Jewish studies and gender and women's studies. They hold a master’s degree from Brandeis and a bachelor’s degree in theatre from Simon's Rock College. Their research focuses on depictions of racial, sexual, and social difference in Jewish literature as a mechanism for both exploitation and solidarity in service of clarifying a Jewish self-concept. When not performing the role of grad student, they perform original queer Jewish gorelesque. 

For this issue, Zissel spoke with Di feder about their work in Yiddish translation and other topics.

Di feder: How did you become interested in Yiddish and involved in Yiddish translation?

Zissel Piazza: I grew up going to Camp Kinderland, a Yiddishist, leftist summer camp with communist roots. We sang a bunch of Yiddish songs and I learned some Yiddish words there. When I was a kid, camp was my favorite place on earth, and such a vital site of my early political education whose influence continues to impact my work today. Even before I knew the history, I always had a sense that the valuing, and love, of Yiddish language and culture was in some way really central to a leftist Jewish politic, and I really felt the absence of Yiddish and leftism in a lot of the Jewish spaces I was a part of outside of camp. 

My first day in Yiddish class, it totally clicked and I was like, “oh yeah, this is where I belong, like forever.” I felt so rooted, in a cultural heritage, a political tradition, even a queer lineage and realized just how much I’d needed that. 

Fast-forward years later as a beginning Jewish studies graduate student at Brandeis, I again felt politically and personally isolated in the field I was entering into. When my advisor suggested I learn Yiddish, I had a sense that shifting gears toward Yiddish would provide the kind of grounding I was craving.

My first day in Yiddish class, it totally clicked and I was like, “oh yeah, this is where I belong, like forever.” I felt so rooted, in a cultural heritage, a political tradition, even a queer lineage and realized just how much I’d needed that. So yeah, I basically pivoted and have been mostly working on Yiddish in the five years since. 

As for translation, I just kind of fell into it without realizing what I was doing, and only after doing it for a couple years did I realize how much I actually like it!

Di feder: How did you discover the work of Maria Lerner? What inspired you to take on the translation of her play Di agune as your Translation Fellowship project? Favorite lines/passages/parts of her play you’d care to share?

ZP: I discovered this play when I was at YIVO a few summers ago helping out Alyssa Quint in the theatre archives. She told me about the play and I just took off from there. In some ways, it’s so predictable and follows a kind of formula of a lot of Yiddish love/marriage dramas of the time, but the fact that it’s from a woman’s perspective adds a level of candor and authenticity that sets it apart. There’s one scene that’s a back-and-forth rant between Rosale and her love, Adolf, about the injustice of the rabbinic system which has no decent protections for agunes, women who have been abandoned by their husbands and cannot move on with their lives until somehow get a divorce. It’s so, kind of messy in a way, like you could feel the playwright having this catharsis and it really feels like a perfect snapshot of a 19th century feminist moment. 

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Di feder: Do you have other Yiddish works you’re currently interested in translating? What’s next?

ZP: I don’t know yet what’s next! I’m always keeping an eye out for new projects, but at the moment, I’m trying to get to the next stage in my PhD, along with teaching Yiddish classes and helping organize for the UC wildcat strikers, so all that’s taking up a lot of time and energy for now!

Di feder: You’re currently completing a PhD at UC Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies with Designated Emphases in Jewish Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies—How does (or doesn’t) your graduate work resonate with your work in Yiddish translation? How has your experience studying Yiddish and working in literary translation influenced your academic studies?

ZP: I like doing research on stuff that’s important to me, but academic research doesn’t necessarily, you know, feed my soul, in the way that teaching and creative work does. It’s been really eye-opening to see how the norms of the academy really devalue translation labor. And, there’s so much pressure to write and have all this brilliant sophisticated stuff to say, that it can be hard to focus on the things that brought me to pursue this work in the first place, which is teaching and learning, community engagement and encouraging students’ creativity and passion. With regard to Yiddish, I wish I could be doing a lot more rigorous Yiddish learning, and creative projects with Yiddish, but it’s really not considered the highest priority, unfortunately. But I’ve found that literary translation is like a go-between that is still in the realm of scholarly work, while providing a stimulating creative project to dive into. 

Di feder: You mention in your translation bio that you perform original queer Jewish gorelesque, which sounds super interesting! Can you tell us more about this? How is it similar/different to burlesque? What about it makes it Jewish? How did you get involved in it?

ZP: At my core I’m a theatre kid, really. I’ve written a couple plays and original performance pieces that I’ve performed over the years, and the content is increasingly Jewish-centric, and well, almost everything I do is screaming, flaming, queer. In the Bay Area I’ve found a really lively drag/burlesque scene, more than I’ve been able to plug into a proper theatre scene, so I’ve started to explore that genre more and more in my own work. Since my teenage years I’ve always been attracted to gore as a powerful subversive aesthetic, and burlesque is like the perfect match, the ideal medium for gore. I am new to this kind of performance in particular, but I am drawn to gorelesque because I think it destabilizes audiences’ notions of pretty/ugly, safe/dangerous, hot/repulsive. Gore is one aesthetic that I think really has the power to make audiences physically move and react, potentially and ideally towards action, in contrast to a model of entertainment that is solely polite and civil and playful, where audiences go to passively turn off rather than be confused about whether they’re turned off or turned on.