Translation of Mary Antin’s Yiddish Letter (Precursor to From Plotzk to Boston)

Translator’s Note

The following translation of Mary Antin’s 1894 Yiddish letter to her maternal uncle, Moshe Ḥayyim Weltman, was produced from the manuscript housed in the Boston Public Library (Ms. Am. 178q). The letter in that collection was bound in 1914 by Antin’s brother-in-law, John F. Grabau, and then deposited in the BPL. The letter was accompanied by a short, handwritten introduction in English by Antin, entitled, “History of the Manuscript” (Mar. 2, 1914), which I have transcribed below. In it, Antin describes how the manuscript of the Yiddish letter came to be preserved. According to Antin, the first draft of her letter was ruined after a lamp was overturned. She subsequently made a copy of the letter and sent that copy along to her uncle in her hometown of Polotsk (now located in Belarus). After translating the letter into English, to be published in 1899 as From Plotzk to Boston, Antin tore up the original letter from which she had made the second copy. She retrieved the copy that had been sent overseas while on a trip to the Polotsk region in 1910. During the journey, she found the letter in Vilnius (now located in Lithuania) in the possession of another uncle, Berl Weltman.

In the translation below, I have endeavored to render Antin’s letter literally so that the interested reader may toggle comfortably between the Yiddish and English. However, to help the general flow of the English translation, I have added punctuation marks where they do not exist in the original. Note that I have allowed Antin’s multiple shifts in tenses to remain and have followed her paragraph breaks. Antin also frequently shifts the narration of her text from the first to the third person and back again. I chose not to smooth out these changes so as to preserve Antin’s rather informal if sometimes choppy style. For the most part, I also did not modernize those Yiddish or antiquated idioms that Antin employs, so as to give readers a sense of the language and terms at Antin’s disposal.

I have also chosen to render the place-names that Antin identifies according to her Yiddish pronunciation. However, I have included a footnote at the first mention of each place-name to indicate the current location of the city and the name by which it is known today. I have also transliterated several Yiddish phrases and Jewish ritual terms that Antin uses according to the standards accepted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, except where an accepted English spelling exists (e.g., matzah, rather than matse).

My larger project has been to compare the Yiddish letter with its subsequent publication in English, From Plotzk to Boston (1899). In the footnotes accompanying the translation, I have noted many, but by no means all, differences that exist between this translation and From Plotzk to Boston. I have elaborated on several of these shifts in the accompanying essay in this issue.

I have used brackets throughout to indicate the page number of the manuscript to which the following English translation corresponds. Note that the manuscript jumps directly from page 55 to 60, apparently due to mis-numbering. Finally, there were several terms and phrases in the Yiddish letter that I was unable to decipher, and I have noted them accordingly.

A Note on the Transcription

In the accompanying transcription of Mary Antin’s Yiddish letter to her maternal uncle, Moshe Ḥayyim Weltman, of 1894, I have attempted to record Antin’s orthography accurately. Accordingly, I have not standardized her text to accord to the system of transcription of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Antin’s Yiddish reader will also find that her orthography corresponds to what is now known as Lithuanian or Northeastern Yiddish. Antin also spells words of Hebrew origin phonetically and inconsistently. For a description of both features, please see the accompanying essay in this issue. Note also that Antin uses punctuation inconsistently, frequently attaches the definite or indefinite article to the corresponding noun, and inconsistently separates prefixes from their...