Outwitting History (37 page)

The bombing in Buenos Aires was a reminder that assaults on Jews and Jewish books are not a thing of the past. All over the world there are ominous signs that anti-Semitism is on the rise. And the tragedy this time is that as lies about Jews grow more extravagant and calumnies more outrageous, most of us know too little about our history and culture to refute them.

Historical amnesia is a dangerous malady, especially for a people whose identity is as dependent on historical memory as ours. And the hour is later than many of us think. Two years ago, as part of our annual Summer Program in Yiddish Culture, Moshe Waldoks delivered a lecture on Jewish humor. A child of Holocaust survivors, a native Yiddish-speaker, a rabbi deeply steeped in Jewish learning, Waldoks was riotously funny—so funny that our adult participants, my wife and I included, were holding our sides, tears rolling down our cheeks, and I was beginning to regret our not having a defibrillator on the premises. After one particularly funny Jewish joke, I happened to turn around to look at our eight student interns, all of them between eighteen and twenty years old. They were standing in a row in the back, arms crossed, and except for one young woman whose parents came from Mexico, they were completely stone-faced. They weren’t laughing. They hadn’t even cracked a smile. Gail and I spoke with them after the lecture to find out why. “We didn’t think it was funny,” one intern explained. “We didn’t get the joke.”

This was not a good sign: If our smartest and most Jewishly committed young people no longer get the joke, it means that on the most fundamental level, they don’t understand Jewish culture.

That is what makes the books we’ve saved so important. In their pages lies a civilization, a missing millennium of Jewish history, the knowledge we need to defend ourselves. Moreover they contain a sensibility, born of marginality, that our fractured world desperately needs. After all, nothing heightens one’s commitment to social justice
more than injustice, nothing hones one’s love of peace more than a few thousand years of violence and oppression. Yet at this precise moment, when threats of terrorism, environmental catastrophe, and nuclear annihilation have the whole world feeling vulnerable, when Jewishness has more to say than ever before, what do we do? We disavow our past, jettison our books, and forget to teach our children who they are.

There’s a saying that a person who speaks many languages is a polyglot, a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, and a person who speaks one language is American. How many American Jews speak Yiddish anymore, and how many are likely to take the time to learn? Our work at the Yiddish Book Center is more than academic. If Yiddish books are even half as important as we think they are, if they really ought to be read, then our next big job is to translate the best into English—the language most readers understand.

Which reminds me of an encounter twenty years ago, when, after a lecture in Los Angeles, I was approached by a determined, white-haired woman clutching a thick sheaf of yellowed paper.

“Yungerman!”
she said. “My name is Trafimov, I am a Yiddish poet. Please, you must help me!”

“Of course, Mrs. Trafimov,” I replied, “what can I do for you?”

“I brought you my poems,” she said, indicating the dog-eared pages in her hand. “I want you should translate them right away into English.”

I explained that translation was a laborious process, that I was working fourteen hours a day as it was, and that, regrettably, I didn’t have the time to undertake a project of such magnitude.

She shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m old, I’m sick. I need you to translate me before I die so my grandchildren should know who I am!”

Although I gave her the names of several people I thought could help, I’m not sure whether her grandchildren ever did get to read her
poems while she was still alive. Twenty years later, with her generation of Yiddish writers now all but gone, it occurs to me that the imperative for translation has changed: It is no longer a matter of grandchildren knowing their grandparents, but rather of grandchildren knowing themselves.

Granted, there are those for whom the very notion of translation seems an act of betrayal, an insult to the original books we’ve worked so hard to save. Back when I was a college student, my Yiddish teacher, Jules Piccus, caught me off guard one day by asking if I had ever read
Don Quixote.
In truth, I had barely skimmed the book when it was assigned in high school, but I did own the record of “Man of La Mancha,” which I figured ought to count for something, so I answered halfheartedly in the affirmative.

Jules raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really,” he said, “I didn’t know you could read Medieval Spanish.”

“Oh no,” I explained, “I read it in translation.”

“Translation?”
Jules bellowed,
“What the hell is that?”

It’s hard to believe, but he insisted that he had never read a book in any but its original language. If he didn’t know the language he went out and learned it. “It’s like the Italians say,” he vociferated, “
Traduttore, traditore
—all translators are goddamned liars!”

Easy for him to say, with twenty languages under his belt. But he did have a point. The few times I’ve had occasion to compare a Yiddish original side by side with its English translation, I’ve been aghast at how sharply divergent the two texts often are. Translators make mistakes, they revise, bowdlerize, or even change endings to suit their own interpretations. I was once at a lecture where Isaac Bashevis Singer told of his own travails:

“There was a line in one of my books,” he related, “in which I said that a woman
‘hot oysgeshrign azoy vi a froy in kimpet.
’ In English, this was
translated as, ‘She cried out like a woman in labor,’ meaning like a woman about to give birth. When the book was translated into Hebrew, the Hebrew translator didn’t know Yiddish, so he had to work from the English translation. In Hebrew the line became, ‘She cried out like a woman in the Histadrut’—like a woman in the Labor movement.”

Of course, when it came to translation Singer was more fortunate than most. His first translator was Saul Bellow, whose masterful rendition of
“Gimpl tam
(Gimpel the Fool)
”
appeared in
Partisan Review
in 1953. (Bellow told me that Singer never hired him again, afraid that people would attribute his stories’ success to their translator and not their writer.) In later years, as his English improved, Singer himself oversaw his translations—perhaps the only real guarantee of accuracy.

Even more dismaying than
how
Yiddish books were translated was
which
Yiddish books were translated. There is an old Yiddish expression:
“Ale kales zenen sheyn, ale toyte zenen frum
(All brides are beautiful, all dead people are pious).
”
In the decades following the Holocaust, there was an understandable attempt to eulogize a world that had been destroyed. As a result, translated titles were often those that cast the Old Country in a rosy glow, while those that portrayed Jews as real-life human beings with frailties and foibles, conflicts and contradictions— in short, the best literature—were, with notable exceptions, largely overlooked. Even today, only one-half of one percent of Yiddish literature—one Yiddish title in two hundred—is available in English translation.

So in 2001 we teamed up with Neal Kozodoy, editor of
Commentary
and head of the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, to launch “The New Yiddish Library,” an international initiative to identify the best Yiddish books and make them available in accurate, literate, and above all, readable English translations. Under the leadership of our
editor-in-chief, David Roskies, the first-ever professor of Yiddish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, our editorial board has identified scores of spectacular titles, virtually all of them unknown to English readers. Forthcoming translations include:

Smugglers
(1920). Twenty-two-year-old Oyzer Varshavski’s debut novel about the upending of traditional values in a Polish shtetl during the “total war” of 1919 when everyone from rabbis to prostitutes resorted to smuggling.

When All Is Said and Done
(
Nokh alemen,
1913). Dovid Bergelson’s masterpiece about the independent daughter of a traditional, aristocratic Jew, who tries to find meaning in a chaotic, radically changing world.

Zelmenyaners
(1931). Moyshe Kulbak’s comic novel about a Jewish family during the era of Soviet collectivization.

Ordinary Jews
(
Yidn fun a gants yor,
1935). Alternately described as a biographical novel and an epic, Yehoshua Perle’s “book of vanished life” deploys a unique, naturalist style to tell the story of a Jewish boy growing up in a provincial Polish city.

The Poetry of Moishe Leib Halpern
. Poet, painter, and bohemian, Halpern led a tormented life on the streets of New York but produced some of the most exquisitely crafted modernist poetry of the twentieth century. John Hollander, the distinguished American poet and scholar from Yale University, will capture Halpern’s impassioned Yiddish voice in English.

Collected Writings of Rachel Auerbach.
With her keen powers of observation, Auerbach left an incomparable journalistic record of Polish Jewish life, both before and during the Holocaust. Her courageous first-person reports from the Warsaw ghetto— included in the underground Oyneg Shabbos Archive—were
buried in milk cans and recovered from beneath the rubble after the War.

And that’s just the beginning. In short, we have no shortage of titles, only of time. It takes a good translator the better part of a year to translate a single book, and thus far, after scouring the United States, Israel, England, Canada, and South Africa, we’ve identified just a half-dozen first-rate Yiddish translators. But the literature is there, as is the need, as are the English readers, so we’re determined to try. Our goal is to publish at least two or three new titles every year. We have every reason to believe that we can continue to dazzle and inspire English readers with newfound Yiddish treasures for decades to come.

My grandmother was sixteen years old when she emigrated to America. She came alone, carrying with her a single cardboard valise packed with all her life’s possessions—a few books, clothing, a goose-down pillow, a pair of Shabbos candlesticks, and a photograph of her mother and father, whom she would never see again. At Ellis Island she was met by her older brother, who had preceded her to America. On the ferry to Manhattan he took her suitcase and flung it overboard. “You’re in America now,” he told her, “it’s time to leave the Old Country behind.”

I was thirty years old when I heard this story for the first time, and my initial reaction was one of outrage. How could my great-uncle have done such a thing? But with the passage of time, I’ve come to take a more philosophical view. If checking our baggage at the gate was the price of admission to America—where we are more free, more welcome, and more accepted than in any other place or at any other time in Jewish history—then maybe it wasn’t such a bad bargain after all. Nor is it too late to make amends. My grandparents and, to a lesser extent, my parents thought of themselves as newcomers in America. I, on the other hand, am American through and through—so comfortable
in my Americanism that I have no compunction about going back to dredge the harbor to reclaim what was lost.

The valise itself, of course, is long gone, buffeted by the currents, buried beneath a century of silt and sand at the bottom of the sea. So I’ve had to content myself with collecting a million-and-a-half Yiddish books instead. Between their covers the voices of my grandmother’s world can still be heard.

I have no illusions, though. I don’t believe, because Yiddish books are now safe, that we’ll all start speaking Yiddish again. The social circumstances that gave rise to the Yiddish language no longer prevail for most Jews. But I do believe that we have much to learn from Yiddish books, just as Jews have always learned from the texts of the past. Moreover, although Yiddish literature itself is likely finite, I believe that its spirit and sensibility can still inspire new Jewish literary expression, in English and other languages.

Is such continuity really possible? In Philip Roth’s 1969 novel
Port-noy’s Complaint,
the young American-born protagonist concedes that he has “twenty-five Yiddish words to [his] name—half of them dirty and the rest mispronounced!” For some, that may have seemed the end of the line. But consider this remarkable scene from
Patrimony,
Roth’s 1991 memoir, in which his father is slowly dying of a brain tumor, and he, Philip, inquires about his
tefilin,
the leather phylacteries worn by Jewish men at morning prayer:

“Who’d you give the tefillin to?” I asked him.

“Who, nobody.”

“You threw them out? In the trash?”

“No, no, of course I didn’t.”

“You gave them to the synagogue?” I didn’t know what you did with tefillin when you no longer wanted or needed them, but surely, I thought, there would be a religious policy for discarding them, overseen by the synagogue.

“You know the Y?” he said to me.

“Sure.”

“Three, four mornings a week when I could still drive over there, I’d swim, kibitz, I’d watch the card game. . . .”

“And?”

“Well, that’s where I went. The Y. . . . I took the tefillin in a paper bag. The locker room was empty, I left them . . . in one of the lockers.”

Maybe it was just revealed to him in a flash . . . the understanding that where his tefillin would come to no harm, where they would not be profaned or desecrated, where they might even be resanctified, was in the midst of those familiar Jewish bellies and balls. Perhaps what the act signified was . . . a declaration that the men’s locker room at the local YMHA was closer to the core of the Judaism he lived by than the rabbi’s study at the synagogue—that nothing would have been
more
artificial than going with the tefillin to the rabbi . . . Yes, the locker room of the Y, where they undressed, they
shvitzed,
they stank, where, as men among men, familiar with every nook and cranny of their worn-down, old, ill-shapen bodies, they kibitzed and told their dirty jokes, and where, once upon a time, they’d made their deals— that was their temple and where they remained Jews.