The Shmooze: The Yiddish Book Center's podcast
Podcast

Diary of a Lonely Girl: Jessica Kirzane Translates Miriam Karpilove

The Shmooze talks with Yiddish professor and translator Jessica Kirzane, a three-time alumna of the Yiddish Book Center, about the recent publication of her translation of Miriam Karpilove's Diary of a Lonely Girl, Or the Battle against Free Love, first published serially in the Yiddish daily newspaper Di varhayt in 1916–18. Jessica began working on this translation in 2017 as a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. The novel, framed from the point of view of a diarist writing in first-person about her own love life, explores issues of women's empowerment and disempowerment around sexuality and politics and offers a snarky, melodramatic criticism of radical leftist immigrant youth culture in early twentieth-century New York.

Listen now

Click here to purchase your copy of Diary of a Lonely Girl, Or the Battle against Free Love.