July 2020: Handpicked
Each month, the Yiddish Book Center asks a member of our staff or a special friend to select favorite stories, books, interviews, or articles from our online collections. This month, we’re excited to share with you picks by Faith Jones.
Faith Jones is the library director at Columbia College Vancouver and was a 2015 Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. Her co-translation of Celia Dropkin's poetry, The Acrobat, has been widely adopted in college classrooms. Her current project is a collection of stories by Soviet writer Shira Gorshman.
After delving into her selections, scroll down to read a short interview with Faith about her choices.
Zelmenyaner, By Moyshe Kulbak
One of my socially-distanced, Zoom-based Yiddish book clubs is reading Moyshe Kulbak's witty, charming, and richly-detailed (though plotless and meandering) novel of a family attempting to find its way in the new Soviet reality, Zelmenyaner (known in the English version as The Zelmenyaners). You, too, can read it in English or Yiddish.
Zelmenyaner, Read by Leib Tencer
You can also listen to it in Yiddish, beautifully read many years ago by a volunteer in the talking book program at Montreal's Jewish Public Library.
Zelmenyaner, Reading Resources
The Yiddish Book Center has also put together a lively collection of resources that consider how this book portrays and at the same time navigates Sovietization.
"Disner tshayld harold"—A Train
While you're appreciating Kulbak, his poetry is also pretty amazing. Enjoy this excerpt from his homage/parody of Byron, "Disner tshayld harold," magnificently translated by Daniel Kennedy.
And if that gets you interested, here's a lovely collection of his poems.
"I Weep for You with All the Letters of the Alphabet"
Kulbak was one of the first Jewish cultural figures murdered by Stalin. Here, translator Josh Price discusses Chaim Grade's elegy for the murdered Soviet writers.
The Romance and Tragedy of Soviet Yiddish Culture
While we're learning more about Soviet writers, David Shneer's 2014 online course is temporarily available for free!
Q&A
Faith Jones talks to the Yiddish Book Center's communications editor, Faune Albert, about her Handpicked choices:
Faune Albert: Your picks focus on Soviet Yiddish literature and culture—and of course you’re currently translating a work by a Soviet writer. I’m curious—what characteristics of Soviet Yiddish writing, for you, distinguish it from other forms of Yiddish writing? Are there notable stylistic differences, or does it more have to do with subject matter (or individual writer)?
Faith Jones: I’m no expert on Soviet Yiddish, but as a reader I have observed some commonalities. Modern Yiddish literature altogether is highly preoccupied with the Jewish relationship to modernity. Soviet Yiddish literature takes this in the direction you would expect, looking at how specific modern ideologies (sometimes competing, sometimes changing over time) make Jewish life simultaneously impossible and completely reborn. The tension between the disappearance of some traditional forms, the lingering of certain stubborn remnants of the old ways, and the new imperatives of how to exist as a Soviet minority are truly the lifeblood of much of Soviet Yiddish literature. I also think the Soviet writers engaged deeply with questions of style. Their experimentation was vast, sometimes playful and sometimes deeply serious: Kulbak’s high-spirited, sexy, meandering Zelmenyaner is all about relationships, where [Dovid] Bergelson used plotlessness to highlight mood. Many of them started this experimentation before the Soviet era, but in the early years of the new Soviet society there seems to have been plenty of room for them to continue.
FA: As noted in your bio, you’re currently working on translating a collection of stories by another Soviet writer, Shira Gorshman. How did you come to this translation project? And what can you tell us about this writer and the stories that you’re working on?
FJ: I first read a story by Shira Gorshman in a Yiddish class in 2001. She had just died, and my teacher, Hershl Glasser, gave us the Forverts obituary and her story “Bobe malke.” That story was later translated by my friend Jennifer Kronovet in the anthology Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars. And then later my feminist reading group read her book of stories, 33 noveln, and some of the stories from Lebn un likht. I translated a few short pieces along the way and eventually decided I wanted to pursue a full collection, which is almost done now.
FA: You completed a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship. How did you initially find your way to Yiddish translation? Do you find that your training as a Yiddish translator impacts the way that you read, particularly works in Yiddish or English translations of Yiddish texts?
FJ: I took a translation class from Irena Klepfisz in my second summer of Yiddish at YIVO—so I suppose even then I thought I’d like to try my hand at translation. A year later I embarked on the Celia Dropkin translations with Jennifer Kronovet and Samuel Solomon while at YIVO again. So it seems my translation practice grew out of learning Yiddish; the two desires emerged together.
I am deeply influenced by Irena, not only because of that first class but also because of her careful thinking about Yiddish and her tremendous openness to other ways of thinking about it. Over the years I’ve been able to work with her on a few projects, and I never stop learning from her. One thing I’ve learned from her is that there is always another, valid way of translating the same text. This really helps me as I look at other translations. I find a lot of translators (and, truth be told, non-translators) are convinced that there is one right way to translate a text, or one right translation practice or ethos. I strive to always remember that, while there are definitely lots of ways you can get it wrong, there are also many ways to get it right.
FA: In the Chaim Grade elegy reading, they talk about how both writing and reading can serve as acts of remembrance in the face of loss . . . which makes me think about your work with libraries, as well as with translation. Both vocations seem, in different ways, to be about preservation but also opening up access to new work?
FJ: How much time have you got? Let me limit myself to just one observation. The printed word is an enormously powerful symbol in Western culture generally, but for Jews in particular it is central. In my master’s thesis on Yiddish in Winnipeg I wrote about local Jewish publishing practices as a way of imprinting oneself onto a new landscape. The book is an object which proves our existence at this time and in this place. “Jews in Winnipeg?” many of your American and overseas readers will probably wonder. But look, books and books and books.
As a librarian I am always amazed by the ways books create worlds around them: the reader that passes a book to another reader, the older friend who can recite the plot of a novel they read fifty years ago, even my LGBTQ+ book club and my two Yiddish reading groups, where all we really know about each other is what books we like—and yet that is enough to make us a community. At my college a student recently read a book of feminist biographies. That inspired her to write an impressive first poem about her experiences of gender as a young immigrant, which the college published online. She is working on her own book of poems now.
That was two observations . . . should I stop now?
FA: The Kulbak poem you’ve chosen here, beautifully translated by Daniel Kennedy, is about leaving home and entering the wider world. Can you tell us anything more about that poem and/or the context in which it was written? What about it speaks to you?
FJ: I like how he skewers the self-important cluelessness of his main character (who, we have to assume, bears some resemblance to Kulbak himself as a young man) and how he uses foreign tropes (Childe Harold’s grand tour of Europe) in ways that are mocking and funny but still serious enough to enlarge the idea of what is possible in Yiddish literature. It’s hard not to read it while reflecting on Kulbak’s early death at the hands of a Stalinist firing squad just a few years later. The feeling of doom in some parts the poem seems hauntingly prescient.
FA: One interesting takeaway from David Shneer’s course on the romance and tragedy of Soviet Yiddish culture?
FJ: Because I’m working on Gorshman I’m interested in the war and immediate post-war era as a moment when Yiddish culture was in tremendous upheaval. This is connected to what I was saying earlier about print publication as a statement of existence. Shneer talks about this moment of openness to Jewish stories during and just after the war and how it suddenly changed in late 1948 so that books that spoke of the Jewish tragedy or gave specific voice to the needs and desires of Jews could no longer be published. It makes me wonder how Gorshman, whose first book came out davka in 1948, would have written and shared her stories until the thaw came.