July 2024: Handpicked
Each month we ask a member of our staff or a special friend to select favorite stories, books, interviews, or articles from our online collections. This month’s picks are by Claire Breger-Belsky.
Claire Breger-Belsky is currently working as a translation and bibliography fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. They received an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and a BA in theater and performance studies from Stanford University. They translate poetry and drama from Yiddish and Spanish, with a particular focus on women writers and on the intersections between Yiddish and Spanish.
Argentinish: Zamlbukh and Antologye fun der Yidisher literatur in Argentine
My first pick is actually two books that very much go together: two anthologies of Yiddish writing from Argentina, both of them only recently digitized. Argentinish, published in 1933, is under a hundred pages and anthologizes nine authors. The 1944 Antologye fun der Yidisher literatur in Argentine, on the other hand, is, at over nine hundred pages, almost ten times longer and has a four-page table of contents; it was published by an editorial committee put together to honor the 25th anniversary of the Buenos Aires–based Yiddish newspaper Di prese, in which many of the anthologized authors would have published.
I can be skeptical of anthologies, knowing that they rarely truly represent the breadth of a specific literature, but as someone deeply interested in Yiddish from Argentina, I find that both of these works provide a dynamic sense of at least some of the writers working there at the time, and I’m very excited to see them digitized—especially since the first is fragile enough to be hard to read and the second is (unsurprisingly) large and heavy!
Read Argentinish: Zamlbukh (in Yiddish)
Read Antologye fun der Yidisher literatur in Argentine (in Yiddish)
“Cribside: A Dramatization of Life in Politics,” Yente Serdatsky, translated by Jessica Kirzane
This short dramatization by Yente Serdatsky balances interpersonal relationships with sharp societal critiques. It’s a fascinating, insightful, and sad scene, and I find myself focusing on something different every time I read it: the language, the translation, the political dimension, the gender politics, the relationships between the characters, or the shape of the action. And as someone with a background in theater, I’m always excited to see more Yiddish drama—especially by women—appear in English translation.
Celia Dropkin’s Paintings
Recently, I’ve been reading about Yiddish artist Ray Faust, whose work is exhibited here at the Center. Though Faust is primarily known for her visual art, I’ve been particularly interested in her writing and how it connects to her painting. This article about Celia Dropkin’s paintings is in some ways the inverse case: I hadn’t known that Dropkin, best known as a poet, was also a painter. I love this glimpse into the breadth of Dropkin’s creative work beyond her writing—and, of course, the chance to see paintings themselves, and to imagine them in relation to the poems they accompanied.
Literary evening in honor of Rokhl Korn to mark the publication of her book A Changing Reality
When I was an intermediate Steiner student, I worked with the Frances Brandt recordings for my internship project and realized how incredible a resource they are. I love going to poetry readings, and it’s wonderful that through these recordings I have the chance to listen to Yiddish poets and writers reading their own work, to hear how they understood the cadences of their writing. This particular recording—a night in honor of the publication of Rokhl Korn’s 1977 poetry collection Farbitene vor (A Changing Reality)—is one of a handful featuring Rokhl Korn reading her lovely, striking poetry, and it’s been segmented into titled tracks by poem, so you can track down what she’s reading and follow along.
Der alter fun Lompaduni, by Yuri Suhl, illustrated by William Gropper
This slim collection of five children’s stories by Yuri Suhl, illustrated by William Gropper, has been one of my favorite books in our collection since I first saw it. Published in Wrocław, Poland, in 1948, the text of each story is printed in a different color, and bold, vibrant illustrations stretch across its pages. (My personal favorites: the starry sky spread across pages 4 and 5 and the personified letters of the alef-beys, brought to life on pages 52–54.)
Q&A
Tell us about your selections and what they say about your relationship with Yiddish language and culture.
I come to Yiddish with diverse literary and creative interests that don’t always immediately connect, which I think is reflected in how many genres I managed to fit into my selections. Because of that, there’s not a unified theme, but in a sense this is a deconstructed portrait of my relationship to Yiddish: moments of poetry and drama, of multi-genre artists, and of Yiddish where it has met Spanish. The selections branched out from the two anthologies, one of which arrived in a donation last fall and the other of which introduced me to the author I translated for our Yiddish in the South series; they are perhaps an attempt—though an inevitably fruitless one—to capture all the different facets of what I love in Yiddish, and all my artistic and scholarly preoccupations, in just a few items.
What are you working on next?
I find the last story of Der alter fun Lompaduni particularly delightful, so I’m working on figuring out how to translate a story whose plot and writing is so tightly connected to an alphabet different from the one it would be translated into. I’m also currently trying to read as widely as I can in and around Yiddish, not just because I love it but also because as a translator, I find it so important to know the literary landscape around the work you’re translating. After my time as a fellow here, I’ll be heading to Argentina on a Fulbright, where I’ll be working with the Centro Documental y Biblioteca Pinie Katz in Buenos Aires and researching women writing in Yiddish in Argentina.