Trailblazer: Joanna Lisek

Dr. Joanna Lisek has seen her once-niche field expand tremendously over the past twenty years. “When I started out,” says the prolific Yiddish- to-Polish translator, author, and Jewish studies professor at the University of Wroclaw, “it was really difficult to learn Yiddish in Poland.” She realized, while writing a thesis on the Polish-Jewish poet Maurycy Szymel, “that the key to understanding Jewish literature and culture in Poland is the Yiddish language.”

After Joanna began her PhD on the Young Vilna group of vanguard writers and artists, she enrolled in a Yiddish course at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw taught by linguist Ewa Geller. Next came a class with a former teacher at a Jewish school, held in Lodz. Both involved traveling long distances from Joanna’s home in Wrocław. “It wasn’t easy,” she says, “because I had two small children. But it was important to me.”

Today, she marvels, “it’s a completely different situation. There are courses in Krakow, Wroclaw, Lublin. We have the Yiddish Culture Center in Warsaw, the Polish Society for Yiddish Studies, new translations of books on Yiddish culture being published.” Nevertheless, Yiddish and Polish literature are still taught separately in universities, and Yiddish writers remain outside the Polish canon.

Joanna and her colleagues are poised to revolutionize that status quo. Kolishe, Joanna’s history of Yiddish women’s poetry over four centuries, was published in 2018 together with My Wild She- Goat: An Anthology of Yiddish Women Poets, edited by Joanna Lisek, Karolina Szymaniak, and Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota. “Both these books were very successful in Poland,” Joanna says, “and they reached a wide range of readers.” Among these en-thusiastic readers were, encouragingly, feminist academics with no links to Jewish studies.

Joanna’s reclamation of Yiddish women’s poetry is indeed a grand feminist achievement. Kolishe, the culmination of over a decade’s work, involved painstaking research of private archives and corre- spondence. “In the press, and in books,” she says, “we find women’s poems that were re-created by men because men were the critics, men were directing the publishing houses. But I was looking for women’s creativity without censorship.”

Ironically, in the late 19th century, when debates around Jewish women’s equality entered the political discourse, a long tradition of Yiddish women’s writing was being eclipsed. As Yiddish literature struggled to gain prestige, Joanna explains, it was masculinized to conform with the European literary mainstream. “In the process of canonizing the literary classics—Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Sforim, I. L. Peretz—a new genealogy was created, one without all the Yiddish literature con- nected with women.”

Joanna marked another notable contribution to the synthesis of Polish, Yiddish, and women’s literature with her translations of Chava Rosenfarb’s Yiddish novels (an endeavor supported by the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Lodz). She also recently translated The Tree of Life, Rosenfarb’s celebrated triptych based on her time in the Lodz

Ghetto, and she is now working on Bociany, set in a prewar Polish shtetl.

For Joanna, translating Yiddish into Polish brings both pleasures and challenges. “Unfortunately,” she says, “we still don’t have a good modern Yid- dish-Polish dictionary. So I use English-Yiddish dictionaries.” She sometimes needs help with religious references because, as she jokes, “I didn’t go a yeshiva!” On the other hand, whereas English translations of Rosenfarb’s fiction omit the names of familiar Polish children’s games and books, Joanna enjoys retaining them for her readership.

She’s spearheading an ambitious publishing venture that aims to highlight the mutual and centuries-long interplay of Jews and non-Jews in Polish society. From 2018 to 2022, the Canon of Polish Jewish Memoirs is publishing twenty-seven memoirs and autobiographies by Jewish authors. The idea was born when Joanna, as part of the Bente Kahan Foundation’s “Yiddish for all” initiative, translated some memoir fragments. With her colleague Marcin Wodzinski, head of Jewish studies at the University of Wrocław, she discussed the possibility of an anthology, which turned into a series.

“It is intended for readers who aren’t necessarily interested in Jewish culture.” Engaging with personal narratives “is a good way to familiarize yourself with the culture of national minorities.” And without Jewish perspectives, any under- standing of Poland’s past can only be partial and inadequate, regardless of one’s own ethnic heritage. Though Joanna has some Jewish ancestry via her grandmother, she chose her career path not “on the basis of blood or genes” but because she regards Jewish history as intrinsic to her country’s identity. “For me, Yiddish culture is an important part of Polish culture.”