Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 3. Remembering Jews: Translating Yiddish after the Holocaust

42 chapter 3 Remembering Jews Translating Yiddish after the Holocaust Nothing teaches more clearly that the world is not yet redeemed than the multiplicity of languages. —Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption Many years ago I got into trouble at an international Yiddish confer­ ence. My transgression? I suggested that Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote primarily for an English-speaking audience and for those—Jews and non-Jews alike—who were fairly remote from either the Eastern European world he pur­ ported to invoke or the immigrant Jewish American experience. A senior, learned, distinguished scholar of Yiddish I deeply respected suggested that the reason I was making this claim was that I had no personal understanding of or access to the shtetl (small town), to cheder (Jewish elementary education), to yeshiva (advanced Jewish religious and textual education), to Polish, to Warsaw, to traditional religious life, to the political revolutions of the twentieth century, to the seductive nature of secular knowledge and the newness of modern romantic love. I had, in short, never known Isaac Bashevis Singer’s milieu. I replied, I am now sorry to say, in a rather petulant and certainly intimi­ dated way. I lamented that if attendance at a traditional Polish yeshiva and rebellion from it were the requirements for the creation of Yiddish scholar­ ship, then most of us in the room were automatically disqualified. I understood this scholar—who will continue to remain nameless—to be putting me in my place by invoking the three exclusionary Gs of Jewish culture: geography, gen­ eration, and gender. On the basis of these, he proclaimed that Yiddish culture Remembering Jews 43 in its deepest (read: most worthwhile) sense was closed to me. I could not argue with this logic, which was, of course, its point. Indeed, I had not been there or done that: I had never set foot in Poland; I was born after the Second World War; and no yeshiva would ever have allowed me to study within its walls. This incident encapsulates for me one of the major problems of translat­ ing Yiddish into English. What was at stake in this exchange had little to do with the literary reputation of Isaac Bashevis Singer, or Yitzhok Bashevis as he is known in Yiddish, and everything to do with the past, present, and future status of Yiddish and the culture of Eastern European and much of American Jewry. More than raising questions about accuracy or knowledge or fidelity to a text, the very act of translation from Yiddish to English seems to hint, as I have been suggesting, at the end of a culture: replacing Yiddish words with English ones seems to suggest that Yiddish has no audience or future. Trans­ lation from Yiddish can feel like a capitulation to history. It implies that these texts will no longer be read by anyone in their original—that these texts, like their intended audience, will disappear. Translation becomes, potentially, a form of obliteration. The ongoing existence of Yiddish, in this context, can be understood as resistance, and translation as an act of collaboration in the destruction of a culture, a betrayal of the language in which it flourished and the millions who spoke it. Yet a simultaneous and seemingly contradictory view of translation also exists. The cultural valence of Yiddish in today’s world suggests that translation may be an act of resistance to history. Increasingly, everything one does with or in Yiddish—speaking, reading, writing, teaching, translation, scholarship— may be understood as a defiant gesture aimed at preserving the traces of a culture that underwent startling and dreadful transformations in the previous century. The arbiters of cultural politics demand that translators be faithful to the Yiddish originals if they are to avoid taking part in the obliteration of the culture they purport to know; translators, in turn, suggest that their work will turn the historical tide, not only preserving Yiddish culture, but helping it proliferate. In either case, however reluctant we may be to invoke it, the lan­ guage of the Holocaust is pivotal to the discussion: as collaborators or resisters, Yiddish translators are inevitably measured by daunting standards. One of the primary questions raised about Yiddish translation concerns its nature as a Jewish language. How can a Jewish language steeped in Jewish ritual and culture hope to be understood in non-Jewish languages? Bashevis 44 Chapter 3 once came to an event in his...