Tevye on King Street: Charleston and the Translation of Sholem Aleichem

Of the green, equatorial jungles, lakes full of noises and blue skies. At eleven in the evening we came into Charleston. . . . . . . . .

—Frania Mazo, December 1922¹

In June 1946 , barely a year after the end of the war in Europe, Crown Publishers in New York printed a collection of twenty-seven stories translated from the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem. The book was called The Old Country. By mid-summer 1946 The Old Country was on The New York Times bestseller list where it remained through September. It was reviewed widely, by Ben Hecht in The New York Times, Irving Howe in Partisan Review, and Robert Warshow in The Nation. During the summer of the Nuremburg trials, no reviewer could resist the association of these recent translations with a memorial for what Maurice Samuel had already called The World of Sholom Aleichem. The Times decorated Hecht's review of The Old Country with one of Marc Chagall's pre-war lithographs of the shtetl above their caption—not his: "The Vanished World of Sholom Aleichem." Ten years later when Irving Howe dedicated his ground-breaking Treasury of Yiddish Stories "To the Six Million," nearly half of his selections of Sholem Aleichem came from The Old Country.²

The translators of The Old Country were my parents, Julius and Frances Butwin, the subjects of a dual biography I am currently writing. Although the reception of Sholem Aleichem, in translation and later on Broadway, would be absorbed into the post-war memory of an Eastern European Jewry destroyed by the war, that is not my focus in this essay. What fascinates me now is the curious path that my parents traveled before they took up the task of translation. What got them to that point?³

By calling attention to the path traveled to the task of translating Sholem Aleichem I want to highlight the geography, or rather the itinerary, of their project—and mine. Itinerary suggests the mobility that often generates literary translation. The very word translation comes to us from the Latin translatum, past participle of transfero, transferre. The verb in all of its forms implies a journey and a crossing over—of rivers, borders, and oceans—to transport oneself or to carry baggage from one domain to another. In its literary definition it means to copy, to render as metaphor, and then to translate.

The act of literary translation may begin as a practical consequence of crossing borders, of changing and retaining languages. On trains and on board ship during the journey of immigration, on the street and in the new school, the canny child picks up new words, acts as interpreter for her parents and adds English to what had already been the multi-lingual exercise of life in eastern Europe. And although I know that very few of the more than two million Jews who left the Russian Pale between the 1880 s and the 1920 s chose my parents' line of work, I am inclined to begin my inquiry with a look at their itinerary.

Both of my parents were born in eastern Europe. Though native speakers of Yiddish, they came to America early—my father as an infant, my mother at age 11 . Both had plenty of time to master the English language before they came to translate the mamaloshn, the mother tongue. My father was born in 1904 in Volkovysk, a shtetl in the middle of what is now Belarus, then Minsk gubernia of the Tsar's empire. His immediate family came to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1905 .

My mother was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1911 when it was also part of the Tsar's empire. Her parents had themselves only recently arrived in Warsaw from two towns just east of Minsk—Mogilev and Borisov. In Warsaw they were part of what Poles—including Polish Jews—called a "Litvak invasion," part of a vast band of recent arrivals considered by some to be dangerous agents of Russian language and literature with a penchant for socialist ideology and godless secularism. To the Polish Hasidim they...