Yiddish, Treasure from a Vanished World. The Impossibility to Translate Yiddish Or the Cultural Limits of Translation

By welcoming the other in his language and thus opening the door to an unknown universe, the translation must take up the challenge of otherness which rests on the capacity, beyond words, to be received in a foreign culture. What happens, in this case, when the culture of the language in question is that of a world that one sought to annihilate in an unspeakable catastrophe? It is in the light of Yiddish that I will deploy the two axes of my reflection on what, beyond translation as a passage from one language and from one culture to another, can ultimately account for the impossibility of rendering the language of the other, of another world. In the case of Yiddish, it is important to consider the mental universe it represents, the Yiddishland and the yiddishkayt. It is to paint the portrait of this now disappeared world, which is not on any world map, that I will apply myself firstly. In a second step, it will be necessary to question the very impossibility of translating Yiddish. With Isaac Bashevis Singer, who “retranslates” his own texts from Yiddish into English, and makes this English translation the matrix of translations into other languages. What happens between the first Yiddish original and the second English original of Singer’s works? Why this need to correct the English versions of his Yiddish texts? These questions raise issues about what Yiddish and the universe it stages represent for Singer: a past world, impossible to render in any other language, the “other world” which has now disappeared? And with Elie Wiesel, whose mother tongue is Yiddish, but who chooses French as the “language of writing”. Wiesel’s “first” work, La nuit, will form the matrix of his novels, built like a fresco in which the works respond to each other, in a Midrashic “infinite reading”. However, at the start of those novels is a story written feverishly and published in Yiddish, … a di velt hot geshvign. This Yiddish text is a cry of revolt and a testimony that the French version will confine to silence, La nuit becoming the very expression of silence. Faced with the impossibility of translating Yiddish, of accounting for the world carried by Yiddish, Wiesel constructs a literary work that will tell a story strewn with clues of this destroyed culture. Could it be, in the last instance, the hidden treasure of Jewish tradition which, precisely out of loyalty to Judaism, cannot be translated? This world which belongs to the Jews and of which they are the only heirs, at the risk of this heritage being lost, for lack of transmission? This questioning could illustrate a reflection on the limits of translation in the light of its cultural and spiritual issues.

5. Into the mainstream

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

Introduction

“Introduction” explores the appellation “People of the Book” as it pertains to the Jews, arguing that, theologically as well as culturally, Jews depend on books to exist. The work of Argentine man of letters Jorge Luis Borges is invoked to introduce the concept of aterritoriality. Modern Jewish literature does not have a specific address and is written in multiple languages. There is a connection between Hasidism, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Israeli literature, and the work of Jewish writers in other diasporas. Jewish literature should also include graphic novels, film scripts, television shows, and other textual manifestations.

Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction explores modern Jewish literature from 1492 to the early twenty-first century, rotating around the concept of aterritoriality to appreciate the diasporic journey Jews have embarked on across geographic and linguistic spheres to the present day. At the center are canonical figures like Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Anne Frank, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Jacobo Timerman, Moacyr Scliar, and Susan Sontag. Unlike the output of other national literatures, Jewish literature does not have a fixed address. As a result, its practitioners are at once insiders and outsiders.

Conflicting Identities

This chapter traces Rahv’s role in forming the canon of 20th century Jewish writing: to use his words, works by writers of Jewish descent. It considers his championing of Franz Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. The significance of modernism, Zionism, and Yiddish in their works is foregrounded. Their stories of Jewishness are interwoven with Rahv’s to illuminate his affirmation of Jewish language and culture, which was marked, however, with ambivalence and irony. To explain Rahv’s ambivalent Jewishness in the 1940s and 50s, this chapter considers what two of his closest friends and associates had to say about him: William Barrett and Mary McCarthy, whose satirical depiction of him in the 1949 “roman à clef” The Oasis provoked Rahv to initiate a law suit. The chapter closes with reflections on what Jewishness meant in Rahv’s world and my own during the 1950s.

Papa, Watch Me Fly

Este artigo analisa o filme Yentl, de 1983 – protagonizado e dirigido por Barbra Streisand – inspirado no conto de mesmo nome de Isaac Bashevis Singer, enquanto quebra de paradigma, ao colocar uma mulher em posição de poder e de dona de seu próprio destino num ambiente religioso onde a posição da mulher é restrita, conectando com o trabalho da própria Barbra Streisand, enquanto protagonista e diretora do filme, além de observar como o papel de Streisand enquanto diretora abriu espaço para outras que vieram posteriormente, deixando – ainda mais – seu nome marcado na história do cinema.

Jewish American Writing and World Literature

Jewish American Writing and World Literature studies Jewish American writers’ relationships with the idea of world literature—how they place themselves within its boundaries, outside its purview, or, most often, in constant motion across and beyond its maps and networks. Writers such as Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley all responded to a demand to write beyond local Jewish and American audiences and toward the world, as a global market and as a transnational ideal. At the same time, their work is deeply informed by an intimate connection to Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular with its own global network and institutional ambitions. This book tracks the attempts and failures, through translation, to find a home for Jewish vernacularity in the institution of world literature. Beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the promise of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. But this promise inevitably remains unfulfilled, as writers struggle to balance potential universal achievements with untranslatable realities, rendering impossible any complete arrival in the US and in the world. The exploration of the translational uncertainty of Jewish American writing joins postcolonial critiques of US and world literature and challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. In bringing into conversation the fields of Yiddish studies, American Studies, and world literature theory, the book proposes a new approach to the study of modern Jewish literatures and their implication within global empires of culture.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature

This chapter offers an account of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s translation practices, from the beginning of his career in interwar Poland to his rise to fame in the postwar period. Like Asch, Bashevis agreed to various forms of essentialization, approximation, and even erasure in order to embed Yiddish within the institution of world literature, declaring his sense of security in US culture while announcing worldly ambitions. Bashevis at times courted the image of the “last Yiddish writer,” self-mythologizing as a paradigmatic Jewish storyteller in order to propose the universalization of Yiddish through translation. Yet, like Glatstein, he remained conscious of the impossibilities of such a task, despite his own strict authorial control over the translation process. This chapter tracks that uncertainty in a series of pseudo-autobiographical short stories written in the 1960s and ’70s, in which Bashevis encounters the ghosts of a vernacular past hovering at the foundation of his work.