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Translating ISRAEL MEDRES Vivian Felsen F rom 1922 until 1964, Israel Medres was a full-time staff writer for the Montreal Yiddish daily, the Keneder Adler. He served the paper in numerous capacities including court reporter, movie reviewer, theatre critic, political commentator, news editor, and labour editor. Under the pen name Ben Mordechai, he wrote his tremendously popular feuilleton, which were short humorous pieces on serious subjects of public interest; these were regularly reprinted in Yiddish newspapers all over the world. He also wrote two books in which he touched upon almost every aspect of Jewish life in Montreal from the 1900s to the 1950s. Montreal fun nekhtn [Montreal of Yesterday]1 was published in 1947, and Tsvishn tsvey velt milkhomes [Between the Wars]2 in 1964, shortly before his death at the age of 70. Almost 20 years after his death, books began to appear, in Yiddish but more surprisingly in English, which mentioned Medres or contained his biography or excerpts from his work. As his granddaughter, I began collecting them and soon had a whole shelf of them: the CanadianJewish Anthology? the CanadianJewish Mosaic,* A Coat of Many Colours,5 the various Lexicons of Yiddish literature,6 histories of Yiddish literature,7 and so on.8 Also on this shelf were the two books written in Yiddishby my grandfather, which everyone in the family knew about, but few could read. Suddenly, in 1997, exactly fifty years after its initial publication, Montreal of Yesterday appeared as a French translation: Le Montreal juif d autrefois .9 This came as a complete surprise to the Medres family. Even more surprising was the fact that its translator, Pierre Anctil, wasa French-Canadian anthropologist who had learned Yiddish in order to study the Jews of Montreal. It was Pierre Anctil's French translation that inspired me to translate my grandfather's two books from Yiddish into English. Medres' two books have now been published in both French and English, and have been received with interest and enthusiasm. Pierre Anctil's recent translation of Tsvishn tsvey velt milkhomes10 earned rave reviews in both La Presse and Le Devoir. The book was considered "a document of the utmost importance."11 It isstriking that the reviews in the French press echoed many of the comments in reviews that appeared in the Yiddish press almost four decades earlier.12 There are several reasons why reviewers then and now have considered Medres an ideal observer and chronicler of his times.13 To begin with, he was intimately acquainted with the community he was describing. Arriving in Montreal in 1910 at the age of sixteen, Medres was typical of the tens of thousands of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who came to Canada during the first two decades of the twentieth century, fleeing the poverty, persecution and pogroms of Eastern Europe. He was born in 1894, in the Russian Pale, in the town of Lechevich, in what is now Belarus. After attending kheder in his little town, Medres, at the age of thirteen, was sent to the yeshiva in Lida. The Lida yeshiva wasfounded and headed by Rabbi Jacob Reines, a founder of the religious Zionist movement, the Mizrachi. Not only did Rabbi Reines introduce modern methodology to the study of religious texts, he was also known for introducing secular subjects, including mathematics and Russian, into the curriculum of his yeshiva, and even encouraging the boys to read the Russian books available in the yeshiva s library. Rabbi Reines himself would lecture the boys on current Jewish problems. By the time Medres left the yeshiva at the age of sixteen to come to Canada, he had a profound knowledge of traditional Judaism as well as some familiarity with modern languages, history, literature, politics, and Zionism. His yeshiva education gave him the tools he needed to become a journalist. Of the early Yiddishwriterswho were his contemporaries Medres wrote: Almost all the Yiddish writers in those days became writers because they were intelligent readers. Before emigrating from the old country they had read scores of books and journals in Hebrew, Russian, and other languages. Once in America they became involved in community activities and felt compelled to write. Former yeshiva students began writing novels... Talmudists from the yeshivas of Volozhin, Telz, Slobodka and Mir, experts in pilpul (subtle argumentation) and Gemore, began to write hair-splitting articles on socialist theory and philosophy on which proletarian intellectuals with radical inclinations sharpened their wits.... Former Hebraist maskilim became specialists in literary criticism, cultural studies, or...

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