January 2024: Handpicked

Sebastian Schulman is the director of special projects and partnerships at the Yiddish Book Center. Prior to joining the Center in his current role, Sebastian served as the executive director of KlezKanada, a leading organization in Yiddish arts and culture located in Montréal, Québec. An alum of the Center’s Summer Internship Program, he has previously worked at the Center as the director of the translation fellowship program and as a development officer. Sebastian is also a writer, editor, and literary translator from Yiddish and other languages, with work appearing through independent presses and literary journals throughout North America. He holds degrees in Jewish studies and history from McGill University and Indiana University, Bloomington. 

Geklibene lider un getseylte poemes (Selected poems and a few epics) by Meyer Kharats 

The poetry of Meyer Kharats (1912–1993) is deceptively simple. At first glance, it’s whimsical and playful, imbued with a lyrical sensibility that draws from the deep well of Yiddish song and Bessarabian folklore. And yet as you read more closely, you’re pulled into a world of emotional complexity, biting irony, and inventive, delicate, sleight-of-hand wordplay. This thick volume brings together the best of Kharats’s verse. In its pages you’ll find a range of themes, from the specificities of Moldovan Jews’ experiences in the Soviet Union or as estranged immigrants in Israel to universal feelings of love, loss, change, and so much more. Marked by a distinctive sense of rhythm and melody, Kharats’s poems have been set to music numerous times by such composers as Chisinau’s Efim Chorny and the Yiddish Book Center’s own Asya Vaisman Schulman. These very same qualities make Kharats’s work quite a challenge to translate into English, but I am hard at work trying to prove myself up to the task!   

Read Meyer Kharats’s poetry (in Yiddish) 

An Evening with Michel Tremblay (March 30, 1980)  

In this program, the great Québécois novelist and playwright Michel Tremblay (b. 1942) reads from his work in English translation and engages in a wide-ranging Q&A at Montréal’s Jewish Public Library. A young man at the time, Tremblay had already achieved the status of a klasiker in Québec literature. Then as now, he is known for his controversial depiction of working class life, women, and gay men and for his apparent chutzpah to use joual—the distinctive sociolect of Québec’s francophone urban poor— on the page and stage. During the introduction to the program, Rivka Augenfeld makes an explicit connection between joual and zhargon, as Yiddish is sometimes derisively known, comparing the process by which both languages were elevated by their artists. After Tremblay’s reading, the Q&A follows numerous directions as Tremblay shares his views on the nature of theatre, politics and fables, folklore and urbanization, culture and globalization, and the use and reception of queer themes in his work, among other topics. Although relations between Québec’s Jews and Catholic francophones are often imagined as inherently antagonistic, the fact of Tremblay’s presence at the JPL and his humble but honest answers on complex issues belies a much more nuanced history. (It’s also worth noting that Tremblay’s relationship with Montréal’s Yiddish community did not end here. His groundbreaking play Les belles soeurs [The Sisters-in-Law, 1965] was translated by Goldie Morgentaler and staged by Montréal’s Yiddish Theatre in 1992.) Most remarkably, this program takes place less than two months before the first failed referendum on Québec’s independence from Canada. 

Listen to “An Evening with Michel Tremblay” (in French and English) 

The Yiddish Burlesque Theatre in Toronto  

In this charming Wexler Oral History Project clip, Marlene Hait recounts how her performance as a young student at the Toronto Peretz Shule took place at what was then known as the Victory Burlesque Theatre on the city’s storied Spadina Avenue. Besides its brief insight into postwar culture in what was then a more peripheral locale on the “Yiddish circuit,” the clip highlights the many-layered and overlapping histories of the building in which her performance took place. Constructed in 1921, the Standard Theatre, as it was then known, is believed to be one of North America’s only purpose-built Yiddish theatre. For the next several decades, it changed owners and names with some frequency, serving over the years as a venue for Yiddish dramas, left-wing rallies, risque burlesque shows, mainstream movies, iconic rock and punk performances, and, when the neighborhood found itself in the center of Toronto’s Chinatown in the 1970s, as a home for Chinese-language cinema, shops, and restaurants. The building still stands more than a century later, although there is little to alert passersby of its multifaceted past. Hait’s story serves as a reminder that the different phases of its history were not as distinct as we might imagine. Yiddish-speaking children might perform on the same stage by day that was occupied by straitlaced “Toronto the Good’s” most scandalous striptease artists by night. In 2018, Toronto’s FENTSTER window art gallery, under the direction of Canadian Jewish arts curator Evelyn Tauben, featured an innovative installation that illustrated the shared Yiddish-Chinese heritage of this space.  

Once at the geographic center of Toronto’s Jewish working class neighborhood, Spadina Avenue was also immortalized by a number of local Yiddish writers. Here Faith Jones translates the aptly titled “Spadina,” a powerful poem of proletarian protest by the left-wing Canadian Yiddish poet Yudica. 

Watch an oral history clip with Marlene Hait (in English).

Queer Yiddish Stories 

One of the most exciting features of the contemporary Yiddish scene is the way it can blend the mastery of a millennium-old tradition alongside a sort of do-it-yourself ethos that focuses on modern culture and values. This is demonstrated perhaps no better than in the way so many of today’s Yiddish cultural endeavours center queer experiences, histories, identities, and creativity. The clips in this collection showcase a range of approaches and reflections on these issues, including excerpts from interviews with Irena Klepfisz and David Shneer z”l, two of queer Yiddishland’s most prominent and beloved figures. 

Watch oral history clips highlighting queer Yiddish stories (in English).

The First American Ladino Novella: Shimon Nessim’s Amerika! Amerika! with Devin E. Naar 

Within the scope of this short presentation, Devin Naar gives us a peek into a vibrant but largely unknown Ladino-speaking world and challenges long-held prejudices about Sephardic Jewish life, history, and culture. As one of today’s leading scholars of Sephardic history and Ladino culture, Naar is a captivating speaker, bringing to life the complexities of his subject with passion, precision, and even a bit of panache. Naar worked on a translation of this same novella as part of the Yiddish Book Center’s 2022 Translation Fellowship. Let’s hope we’ll be able to read his English version of this story soon! 

Watch a virtual public program with Devin E. Naar (in English) 

Subways, Skyscrapers, and Strikes: High-Schoolers Write about NYC 

It may have been published some 94 years ago, but there’s something strikingly urgent and contemporary about the book examined in this short essay. In “Nyu-york: a zamlbukh,” a group of young women and men document the hustle, bustle, and struggle of their city with equal parts creativity, youthful fervor, and radical politics. Former Center fellow Joseph Reisberg expertly provides the context for this document, situating the book—which might be easily dismissed as the scribblings of a few rowdy teenagers—as a vital, lively reflection of its times.  

Read an essay about 1930s New York students by Joseph Reisberg (in English) 

Q&A

Tell us about your selections and what they say about your relationship with Yiddish language and culture. 

When looking at our collections my attention is always drawn first and foremost to those landscapes that have shaped me as a Yiddish speaker, learner, teacher, and klal-tuer. In this case, I mean Moldova/Bessarabia and Canada/Québec, the places where I have been able to most fully immerse myself in Yiddish culture, language, and community. Both locales occupy a somewhat variable place in Yiddish cultural history, sometimes at the periphery of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and North America, at other times right in its very center. Both Moldova and Québec are also linguistic borderlands, dynamic places where languages and cultures live in constant contact, friction, and interchange. My two selections from New York—by some estimates the world’s most linguistically diverse city—highlight similar dynamics. In both Shimon Nessim’s New York and in the city depicted by Nyu-york’s teenage writers, language is often the site of cultural collision, the lens through which ideas are exchanged, polemics launched, and political futures made possible.  

I also have an enduring desire to learn Ladino in a serious way. As Naar points out, the language is often denigrated, ignored, or misunderstood. In some Yiddishist circles, I’ve noticed that it is often patronizingly, if lovingly, characterized as simply “Sephardic Yiddish,” a language and culture that only seems to exist “in comparison.” But thanks to Naar and his colleagues, there is a growing appreciation for Sephardic history and culture as a distinct universe in its own right, and that’s a world I would love to explore more fully. Please sign me up for the next course! 

In comparison to other locales, Moldova and Canada are also two sites where, despite deep social change, Yiddish culture has demonstrated surprising longevity, continuity, and transmission. Often this success has been due to what we might call “nonlinear” forms of passing down the culture outside of more traditional family or neighborhood contexts. Rather, outside of Hasidic circles, Yiddish culture has been transmitted within grassroots cultural, community, and peer-to-peer supported initiatives. In their clip in Queer Yiddish Stories, Zohar Weiman-Kelman draws a parallel between this process in Yiddish culture and how queer identity, culture, and history have been similarly transmitted beyond the structures of heteronormative society. While many scholars find the bond between Yiddish and queer culture as stemming from their shared experience of marginalization, it’s these more complex connections that I find particularly inspiring.  

What are you working on next?  

I’ve only just rejoined the staff of the Yiddish Book Center recently. It’s been wonderful getting reacquainted with our programs, collections, and my coworkers! In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be working on a wide portfolio of initiatives, including the Great Jewish Books Club, our public libraries program, as well as some teaching and writing projects. Adjacent to my work at the Center, I always have a few translation projects in the works in and between a few different languages, and I have recently begun writing my own short Yiddish fiction.