Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has been long in the making, and I am indebted to a number of organizations and individuals for support and advice over the years. I am extremely grateful to the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and to the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation for their grants to subvent the publication of this book. A fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Judaic Studies, formerly the Annenberg Research Institute, in 1989, gave me the opportunity to begin revising the translations of the poems. The Marie Syrkin Fellowship, under the auspices of The New Republic, granted me a month of writing time at Mishkenot Sha'ananim inJerusalem, in August 1991. Fellowships from the Ratner, Miller, Shafran Foundation, the Fox Fund and the William and Gertrude Lipman Foundation, all of Cleveland, Ohio, helped support this project in its early stages. The librarians and archivists at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City and at the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem were as always helpful in locating texts and sources. I have been extremely fortunate to have had many readers of the translations and the introduction in draft. These patient friends and colleagues have offered me comments and suggestions that helped enormously in my revisions. I am especially grateful toJohn Felstiner, Gella Schweid Fishman, and Irving Massey, and to a host of others who also read the manuscript or responded to individual translations. If I have forgotten anybody's name, I beg 14 Acknowledgments forgiveness. My gratitude extends to Chana Bloch, Andrew Firestone , Amira Goma, David Kenosian, Irena Klepfisz, the late M. Littvin, Allen Mandelbaum, Helen Nakdimen, Anita Norich, Avraham Nowersztern, Adrienne Rich, Chava Rosenfarb, David Roskies, Sheila Segal, Sara Sfatman, Vera Soloman, Carol Troen, Josh Waletzky, Miriam Waddington, my Yiddish literature and language students at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Women's Writers Group. I thank Itzik Gottesman, David Guralnik, Mikhl Herzog, Sol Katz, Mordkhe Schaechter, and Dov Noy for sharing their expertise in the Yiddish language with me. With all this help, I nonetheless take full responsibility for whatever errors or infelicities may mar my rendering of Molodowsky's poetry. Other colleagues helped me with background information: Darra Goldstein provided information on Lermontov and the legendary Tamara. Mendele listservice subscribers, especially Paul Pascal of Toronto and Gaston L. Schmir, gave me geographical details on Otwock and Bereza Kartuska. Michael Steinlauf advised me on Polish details. Dovid Fishman alerted me to materials on Molodowsky. Haya Bar-Itzhak and Dan Ben-Amos advised me on details of folklore. Kadya Molodowsky's friends and family have been extremely helpful. Elain Drost Friedman generously gave or lent me copies of Molodowsky's books, manuscripts, letters, photographs from the collection of her parents Yosel and Bessie Drost, and shared with me her personal recollections. Kadya Molodowsky's niece and nephew, Edith Litman Schwarz and Ben Litman, were also extremely generous with their own memories and their aunt's family photographs. Michael Silver of Victoria, Australia, granted me an informative interview about Molodowsky when she taught him in Warsaw. Naomi Zuckerman and Mordechai Tsanin gave me insight into Molodowksy's years in Israel. My delightful conversations with David Rosenthal over the years have helped fill in my sense of Molodowsky as a person and provided crucial details about Warsaw in the 1930s. I also thank Arthur Evans and Janet Witalec at Wayne State University Press for their rigor and support in the production of this publication. I am grateful to my mother Dr. Mary F. Hellerstein and my late father Dr. Herman K. Hellerstein for their encouragement and support. I thank my children Rebecca and Jonah Stern, who, 15 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS listening repeatedly to my translations of Kadya's children's poems, have offered questions, comments, and interpretations. Their babysitters Catherine Felton and Elisha Williams gave me the gift of time. Finally, I thank my husband, colleague, and fellow translator, David Stern, for his advice, support, and faith in me and this project from its very beginnings. I dedicate this book with love to him. 16 ...