From Steiner to Translation Fellowship, and More: Two Three-time Yiddish Book Center Alumni Talk About Their Experience

Miranda Cooper was a 2017–18 Yiddish Book Center Fellow and a 2019 Translation Fellow and is also an alum of the 2018 Steiner Summer Yiddish Program. She is currently a translator, cultural critic, and freelance writer based in NYC. 

Zeke Levine was a 2017–18 Yiddish Book Center Fellow and a 2019 Translation Fellow and is also an alum of the 2016 Steiner Summer Yiddish Program. He is currently completing his doctorate in musicology at New York University.

They were joined by Yiddish Book Center director of communications Lisa Newman, host of the podcast The Shmooze, for a conversation about their experiences in these programs and how their work with the Center continues to impact their lives today.

Lisa Newman: Thank you both for joining me to talk about your experiences as Yiddish Book Center alum of multiple programs, including the yearlong fellowship program. To begin, can you tell us what you're working on at the moment—in life and Yiddish translation, wherever it intersects?

Miranda: Right now I'm translating short stories by Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, a mid-twentieth century American Yiddish fiction writer, which I'm really excited about. I'm also an editor at In geveb, a fiction reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, and I do some freelance writing about (mainly Jewish) books and culture for other outlets as well.

Translating fiction has definitely helped me as a literary critic: as a translator, you have to contend with every single one of the author's choices on the language level and figure out how best to represent those choices in English. As a result, when I read original English-language fiction, I notice patterns in syntax, grammar, and diction that affect how I view the work as a whole. I think doing literary translation has made me a better reader and reviewer, which I guess is a pretty important thing for someone basically trying to make a living reading fiction.

I don't really have any other big projects at the moment, but I'm definitely on the lookout for something new and exciting for my next translation endeavor.

Zeke: In life, I'm still in coursework for my PhD trying to narrow down a dissertation topic. Right now what I'm really interested in is mid 20th century . . . basically looking at the Yiddish political music or the music of Yiddish political organizations to see how these intersected with or paralleled the American folk revival. Right now I have some strong evidence for paralleled, and I'm looking for more evidence of intersection, although there are these obvious things like Ruth Ruben and Pete Seeger singing Yiddish songs together on TV. Things like that are pretty interesting.

Currently, my academic work does intersect with my translation work because I'm just finishing up this set of translations from Sam Liptzin and, as pretty much everybody I've talked to about this project knows, I got interested in him through his songbooks. Right now I'm actually working on formalizing a smaller project to really dig into those songbooks . . . He actually wrote some of the songs in there, and then he wrote forewards for each of these volumes, and there were three volumes and it was, why am I compiling a song book? It's this really interesting rhetoric about how music brings people together and their strength when people come together and sing. This echoes a lot of what you hear from people in the American folk scene who were thinking politically and socially about the meaning of the music and particularly the sense of bringing people together . . . the sense that there's power in numbers. There are things that we'd all like to change, and music can be one way in which we bring people together. Many voices become one. There's strength in that unity. So I'm finding all this stuff very interesting. It relates directly to the translation project that I'm hopefully almost done with.

LN: So you're focusing mostly on American music?

Zeke: Yeah. I'm really interested in people like Liptzin. From the time that he moved from Belarus in 1909, he lived in New York his whole life. I'm interested in these really American figures and these American organizations. Because the other thing that you get in the American context is that there's this engagement with race in America that is totally fascinating. People from the field of Yiddish literature have written about it. What does it mean for Yiddish writers to be engaging with the African American experience and race relations in America? But, especially for those who are aligned with the Communist party, there were massive anti-lynching campaigns, really a strong support for the civil rights movement.

LN: If I’m not mistaken, you first did the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, then the Yiddish Book Center Fellowship, and now you're doing a Translation Fellowship. I'm curious to figure out what drew you to Steiner, and were you surprised that you've followed this path as it were, when you came to Steiner? Did you have any inkling that you would do that?

Zeke: Not really because I came to Steiner the summer after I graduated from college, and I graduated with a jazz performance degree. So, the way my life had looked like it was going to be going, I was going to be settling in a city somewhere and being a bass player. Once I did Steiner, I realized that I had a knack for this, for Yiddish. I found the Yiddish stuff to be super interesting, and Steiner's just the tip of the iceberg as far as Yiddish Book Center programs. So, I just kept applying and fortunately kept being accepted. So no, I didn't really expect it, but I'm thrilled that this is the path that things have taken in the last few years.

Miranda: I actually did things a bit out of order—I was accepted to Steiner years ago but decided to spend that summer doing a creative writing program instead. I've often thought about the ways my path might have been different if I had started then—I might not have met some of the people who ultimately became some of my best friends! That fall, I took introductory Yiddish courses at Columbia, and applied to the Yiddish Book Center Fellowship; the summer right before the Fellowship, I did the YIVO summer program, and then I actually did the higher level of Steiner after my fellowship year.

I do think that, for me, once I started learning Yiddish, it sort of felt inevitable that this would become a huge part of my life and career. I never really questioned it or looked back; I dove in headfirst and never came up for air. Since I began learning Yiddish in 2016, I've spent every summer in a Yiddish program. 

LN: Do you find that you can reach out to the other Yiddish Book Center alumni that you’ve connected with through these programs in terms of getting advice or direction, or not? Is it helpful?

Miranda: Absolutely. There's a definitely a strong community of Yiddish Book Center alums, people who have done different programs at different times, and I've definitely given advice to friends from my Steiner year who were thinking about applying for the Fellowship, or for the Translation Fellowship.

Zeke: Yeah, certainly there's people that I've met through Yiddish Book Center programs who I'm in contact with a lot. For instance, I actually never did a program with Adah [Hetko], but we were at the Yiddish Book Center at the same time for two summers. I saw her last time I was in Boston and we've been talking about music and scholarship. Mikhl [Yashinsky] is another great example. He's in New York, so I see him not as often as I'd like to, but I see him from time to time.

LN: There are a lot of [Yiddish Book Center alumni] in New York and I don't know how many of you actually do connect, but what are that scene and those connections like?

Miranda: Mostly I just hang out with Zeke! But there are definitely Yiddishist events pretty often where you do end up seeing people connected to the Yiddish Book Center. Dylan Hoffman (Steiner '18) and I also see each other frequently, because we're both currently freelancing and working remotely, and we've played around with translating a couple songs.

Zeke: It's interesting because it's spread out, but there are a lot of Yiddish events. There was Asch Wednesday last week. I see a lot of familiar faces. I'm trying to think of what other events I've been at recently. Unfortunately, I haven't been very active, but there's so much Yiddish stuff going on that has the same faces. You see the same faces at these different events and often they're people that I recognize, either from meeting them at the Yiddish Book Center or hearing stories about them from the Yiddish Book Center, things like that.

LN: Do you want to tell me a little bit about what it's been like to be a Translation Fellow?

Zeke: Sure. It's been a wild year. It's interesting to have the time to really try to settle into an author's voice. I'm thinking back to the three weekend workshops . . . Because the first weekend workshop was a year ago this week I think, right? I think it was the first weekend of March. Just thinking about where my project was then, I had some stuff translated but I was spending a lot of time really trying to work through these things and what do I want this to sound like? And then thinking to the July workshop where I felt like I had a little bit better of a grasp on things, and then that progressing then to the November workshop and then to where we are today.

Taking that time, having that network of people to help out and give feedback . . . I feel I've gotten into Sam Liptzin's voice a little bit better and it's actually made the process much, much easier and, frankly, more enjoyable to sit down with his work and really get inside his head instead of just translate the words. It's definitely been a learning process and a growing process and, in this sense, a spiritual communing-with-the-dead process. It's powerful.

Probably one of the most interesting things that I found at the Yiddish Book Center was when we were digitizing tapes from 2004 or maybe 2007, when work was being done on the roof. Someone was hired to basically film the roof for an hour, like a roofing expert and just talk about the problems with the roof. It's an hour of detail, of extreme detail about the state of the roof of the Yiddish Book Center. 

LN: Best discovery while you were here or after?

Zeke: That's a good question. The greatest resource for me has definitely been the digitized collection. And best discovery—probably some of the Liptzin stuff. I discovered that when I was working at the Yiddish Book Center. I hadn’t heard of him before, and I found this little yellow book with this smiling old man on the back and I saw the title of it and I was just so intrigued and so interested . . . I'm trying to think through all of the recordings and the films that I got a chance to listen to . . . Probably one of the most interesting things that I found at the Yiddish Book Center was when we were digitizing tapes from 2004 I think, or maybe 2007, when work was being done on the roof. Someone was hired to basically film the room for an hour, like a roofing expert and just talk about the problems with the roof. That's just a really interesting video to exist. It's an hour of detail, of extreme detail about the state of the roof of the Yiddish Book Center . . . There's a lot of things like that in the archives . . . I was working on providing metadata for these recently digitized videos and audio recordings and there's a lot of stuff like that. Tons of events. There's a lot of footage from Steiner 2005, which is really cool to watch because the layout of the Yiddish Book Center was just completely different at that time, and the work that the Steiner students were doing was completely different and the hairstyles and the clothing and everything . . . a lot more spiky hair. It's just a great time capsule.

Miranda: I came across a really beautiful edition of the book In a literarisher shtub (In a Literary House) by Elkhonen Zeitlin, son of Hillel and brother of Aaron. Hillel and Elkhonen both died in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Aaron managed to publish Elkhonen's book posthumously, with an afterword commemorating his brother. It had such an arresting cover, so that's what drew me in at first, and when I realized it was a memoir of literary life, written by someone whose life had been cut short by the Nazis, and yet published against all odds by someone who survived and committed to remembering their lives, it seemed to me to represent so many layers of commitment to the survival of the literary in the face of annihilation. Though I was already familiar with and intrigued by Aaron Zeitlin, his afterword moved me so much and led me to seek out more of his poetry, and that ultimately led me to write a new translation of his poem "Zeks shures" ("Six Lines"), which I felt was so incredibly beautiful and powerful, and I didn't feel as though the English translations that were out there really did it justice. I'm in no way sure that mine does either, but I wanted to try my hand at it.