Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America

Translation and Romanization

xxi Letters in brivnshtelers have their own peculiar challenges for the translator . These are texts written in a variety of styles, sometimes graceful and heartfelt and sometimes awkward and stilted, even by letter-manual standards. Written across a century, the letters reflect stylistic changes in written Yiddish: the Germanisms that mark the prose of the early nineteenth century are largely purged in books published later at the turn of the twentieth. Letters include Hebrew salutations, abbreviations, and sometimes quotes from the Tanakh and other holy books, along with Russian words transliterated into Yiddish. In our translations, we have striven to portray the prose of Yiddish brivnshtelers in all its diversity. We have approached with a light hand the occasional artlessness of the prose, choosing to hew closely to literal translation as much as possible, and have not attempted to rationalize the prose of the different authors into one homogenized style. We have also preserved, as much as we could, the punctuation used in the letters (for instance, inserting ellipses if they appear in the originals), as well as variant spellings of names. Other translation choices are noted in the annotations to the translations. For transliteration of Yiddish, we have followed the long-established YIVO romanization system. For Hebrew, we have followed the romanization system of the Library of Congress, though in a simplified form, without the special characters used to represent khet, tet, kuf, and sin. For Russian, we have followed the Library of Congress, with exceptions made for a few proper and place names (e.g., Trotsky, Moscow). All Russian Empire place names have been romanized according to Library of Congress rules for Russian. Our multilingual writers often had Yiddish, TRANSLATION AND ROMANIZATION xxii Translation and Romanization Hebrew, and Russian variants of their personal names. When referring to them within the text, we have mostly adhered to the choices made by The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Whenourbibliographycites works by the same author in different languages, we have transliterated the name used for that language. So, for example, S. An-ski is the author of Yiddish works, and S.A. An-skii of Russian ones. To avoid anachronism, Hebrew titles of books published in Eastern Europe, as well as a few other phrases in Hebrew, are romanized according to YIVO rules of transliteration to reflect Ashkenazi pronunciation, with the more modern Hebrew transliteration following in brackets. Finally, a number of inconsistencies in brivnshteler texts have affected the way this book looks and reads. Brivnshteler writers never agreed among themselves about how to present letters. Some letters start with dates and places, and the fictional correspondents have full names, and sometimes everything is generic. In all these cases, we have followed the styles of the individual brivnshtelers. Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl This page intentionally left blank ...