(Jewish Group) More than shtetl and pogrom: Inside the movement to translate Yiddish
“Yiddish has been made to represent the failure of Jewish life in Europe,” remarked Mindl Cohen, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center. Connecting Yiddish with shtetls, pogroms and the Holocaust created a narrative of an old-fashioned way of life that disappeared in the wake of modernity and antisemitic violence. The message was that “this culture didn’t survive, maybe because it wasn’t fit to,” Cohen said.
But the narrative might change if Yiddish literature were better known. Yiddish didn’t lose the battle with modernity; on the contrary, modern Yiddish literature thrived in the 20th century and never died. “Read a crazy sexy poem from a woman writer in the nineteen-teens,” Cohen suggests. Or a novel about a man who indulges in continental philosophy in interwar Berlin. Or a novel by a woman about her skepticism that “free love” in turn-of-the-century New York was good for women.
If only people knew. The problem is, relatively few secular people can read modernist Yiddish writing. (Hasidic Jews speak Yiddish, but are unlikely to read secular Yiddish literature.) And because of the dominant narratives around Yiddish, there’s no demand for it in translation. Instead, people turn to Yiddish literature to experience a lost world of Jewish tradition that serves as an escape from modernity as well as a post facto justification for its demise.
“People have preconceived ideas of what Yiddish is; if you’re going to read something in translation from what Yiddish is, you want it to fit a sentimentalized view of the Jewish world, and fit your preconceived view of that world including Holocaust memoirs and religiosity,” said Jessica Kirzane, assistant instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago. “There is an expectations gap; Yiddish literature is not just about Jewishness. So much of Yiddish literature was about modernization, and was rebelling against the Jewishness that people turn to Yiddish for.”
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