Sarah Smith: Yiddish, Translation, and Popular American Fiction

When introducing an author who has never been studied before, providing them with an address or a trajectory through time and space can make their work appear legible and categorizable while also revealing just the opposite—how a writer crosses boundaries geographically and culturally. This indeed is the case for the subject of this article, the American Yiddish writer Sarah Smith. Smith was born Sore Brandstein in 1888 in the small town of Bishtina (its Yiddish name; it is known as Bushtyno in Ukrainian and Bustyaháza in Hungarian). She later moved to Budapest with her family before immigrating to the United States in 1903. In New York, she met and married Max Smith, formerly Meyer Shmit of Kopulye (today’s Kopyl in Belarus), before becoming a writer and journalist in the Yiddish press (Elis 469). She became a fixture in the American Yiddish press from the 1910s until the 1950s while also making a few minorly successful forays into Broadway and Hollywood. Family lore has it that after each windfall of cash (from selling a novel to a Yiddish newspaper or getting a play optioned as a film), she would splurge on a boat trip to Western Europe. She passed away at her home in Babylon, Long Island, in 1968.¹

One could read this account as following a common linear trajectory of Americanization: the Hungarian Jewish immigrant leaves the Old World behind and successfully integrates into the New World. However, such a sentence flattens the multiple languages, geographies, and cultures that are embedded in this brief biographical sketch. Indeed, one could read this narrative as a failure of Americanization: the fact that Smith relied on an immigrant and foreign-language institution (the Yiddish press) for her livelihood and creative outlet could signal her lingering attachment to an absent Eastern Europe. Then there is the complexity of the Old World as she knew it: Smith came of age in Budapest, a central hub of modern European culture, a site that continued to draw her interest (at least for vacation) even after her immigration. Thus, calling Smith an “American Yiddish writer” points to a series of questions: what does it mean to name Smith and her work as “American,” beyond indicating her address and her citizenship, and how does Yiddish converge with that identification, if at all?

This fractured geography and its attendant cultural uncertainty can be found in Smith’s relationship to language as well, even though she wrote almost entirely in Yiddish. Yiddish was likely one of the languages of her home, but since she grew up in the relatively liberal Austro-Hungarian empire (compared to the Russian Empire), much of her life, including her schooling, was conducted in Hungarian and German. Once in the United States, she had to learn English quickly and evidently consumed a large amount of English-language literature and theater. At the same time, by joining a community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, she had to start using Yiddish more than she had previously. The story goes that after arriving in the United States, when Smith turned to Yiddish journalism to escape the drudgery of factory work, she had to learn proper literary Yiddish, having not cultivated it as a child in Hungary (“Sarah”). Irving Howe claims that something of the approximate nature of her Yiddish—its reliance on German and English over a lexicon more rooted in Eastern European Jewish life—lingers in her writing, arguing that she was “tone-deaf” to the language’s idiomatic verve (547).²

Thus, the label “American Yiddish writer” is particularly apt and fraught when used to describe Smith. Her prodigious output, largely as a regular contributor to New York’s Yiddish daily Der tog (The Day), blurs the boundaries between seemingly separate spheres. Writing mostly for the women’s sections of the newspaper, Smith focused on the experiences of Jewish immigrant women, in their “mother tongue,” while simultaneously introducing them, sometimes sensationally, to debates surrounding white American sexuality, urbanity, and domesticity taking place predominantly in English-language forums.³ One can glean from just a small selection of the titles...