Yiddish Translation Research Articles

The Jewish Traveler and the Protestant Shoemaker: A Hans Sachs Poem in Yiddish

Abstract This article discusses a new finding – the first known Yiddish translation of a literary piece by the famous 16th-century Meistersinger Hans Sachs (1494–1576). The translation was copied, shortly after the original piece was printed in German, as part of a manuscript that includes various lists on various topics copied by a traveling Jew named Uri ben Simon. The examination of the translation and its context in Uri ben Simon’s codex are used as an example of inter-cultural exchange in the early modern German space.

Skeletons in the Hebrew Closet: Yiddish Translations of “In the City of Killing” by Y. L. Peretz and H. N. Bialik and the Conflict over Revival

The scholarship on Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik’s most canonical Hebrew poem, “In the City of Killing,” persistently returns to its origin story in the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. This article turns to the poem’s Yiddish translations—the first by Bialik’s colleague, admirer, and ideological opponent Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, and the second by Bialik himself—and challenges notions of origins, originals, and unfaithful translations. It pays attention to a consistently suppressed fact: parts of the poem in the canonized form known to us today, particularly those that bring the poem’s fascination with the gothic and grotesque to new heights, were introduced into the poem through Peretz’s Yiddish rendition. Bialik then borrowed these images and tropes and incorporated them into his own Yiddish translation, ultimately translating them into Hebrew and integrating them into the final, canonized version only in 1923. Rather than contesting accusations of Peretz’s “disloyal” translation or accusing Bialik in turn of plagiarism, this article grapples with the philological impetus to search for definitive originals and the desire for textual stability. An entangled web of bibliographical evidence, unfaithful renditions, and unacknowledged textual relatives exposes translation as a productive and unruly site of literary transfer, as a site of conflict. That conflict should be understood in political terms, as a conflict over the means, character, and grounds for a Jewish national revival. The poem’s translational history reconstructed in this article summons, finally, a renewed evaluation not only of the ties between Hebrew and Yiddish and between original and translation, but also more broadly of Jewish textual culture in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.

A Sphinx upon the Dnieper: Black Modernism and the Yiddish Translation of Race

This article examines the context and content of the 1936 Soviet Yiddish publication of Neger-Dikhtung in Amerike, which remains to this day the most extensive anthology of African-Diasporic poetry in Yiddish translation. The collection included a critical introduction and translations of nearly one hundred individual poems by twenty-nine poets, both men and women, from across the United States and the Caribbean. This article examines the anthology's position amongst different notions of “the folk” in Soviet Yiddish folkloristics and the relationship of these ideas to Yiddish-language discourse about race and racism, the writings of James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois, with whom Magidoff corresponded, and the Yiddish modernist poetry of Shmuel Halkin, who edited the book series in which the anthology appears. When placed alongside Du Bois's and others’ visits to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the appearance of African-American and Caribbean poetry in Yiddish translation shows how a transatlantic Jewish avant-garde interpreted and embedded itself within Soviet-African-American cultural exchange in the interwar years. Magidoff served as a Soviet correspondent for NBC and the Associated Press from 1935. He was accused of espionage and expelled from the USSR in 1948.

“Galicia borders on Berlin” - Yiddish translations of German-language classics as an expression of assertive Yiddishkeit

Das Zitat „Galizien grenzt an Berlin“ entstammt dem Schauspiel „Der Kaufmann von Berlin“, das Walter Mehring 1929, mit Blick auf die Inflationszeit Mitte der 1920er Jahre, verfasste. Der Satiriker und scharfe Beobachter zeichnete darin ein Kaleidoskop der Metropole Berlin als Sammelbecken unterschiedlichster kultureller und politischer Bewegungen. In jenen Jahren war Berlin wenn auch kein Sehnsuchtsort so doch ein Orientierungspunkt für die vielen jüdischen Migranten aus Osteuropa. Die Hauptstadt der jungen Weimarer Republik diente als Zwischenstation auf dem Weg aus der Unterdrückung in die Freiheit und symbolisiert, als Metapher für eine Kultur und Geisteshaltung, jenen Übergang vom verklärten Schtetl-Dasein hin zu einer selbstbewussten, aufgeklärten „Jiddischkeit“, die in den osteuropäischen Metropolen ihren Ursprung nahm. Nicht erst zu Beginn der 1920er-Jahre, als Berlin einer der bedeutendsten Verlagsorte für jiddischsprachige Publizistik war, rückten deutschsprachige Klassiker und Bestseller in den Fokus der jiddischen Publizistik. Wurden diese bis dato in Warschau, Wilna, Kiew, Moskau oder Odessa im Original gelesen, machten sich hier wie dort jiddischschreibende Autoren daran, Lessings Nathan, Heines Lieder, Schillers Räuber aber auch Marx' Kapital zu übersetzen und deren Ideen, Ideale und Ideologien innerhalb des osteuropäischen Judentums zu verbreiten. Der vorliegende Beitrag gewährt einen Einblick in die jiddische Übersetzungslandschaft und Publizistik deutschsprachiger Literatur bis zum Beginn des Zweiten Weltkrieges.

When the days are long and people are idle: two sixteenth-century Yiddish translations of Pirkei Avot

ABSTRACT Pirkei Avot (Chapters of the Fathers), a tractate of the Mishna containing ethical and moral teachings, is one of the most popular and commonly read works in the Jewish library. Little has been written about the Yiddish translations of Pirkei Avot from the Early Modern period. A comparison of the Yiddish translation in an Italian manuscript penned by the scribe Anshel Levi (completed in 1578/9) and that printed in Cracow around 1590 suggests the existence of an earlier Yiddish tradition that circulated in manuscript or oral form and was adapted by writers/printers in different locations according to their needs.

Fiddler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof ), music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein, Yiddish translation by Shraga Friedman, directed by Joel Grey

Review of: Fiddler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof), music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein, Yiddish translation by Shraga Friedman, directed by Joel Grey Stage 42, New York, 21 March 2019

A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman (review)

Reviewed by: A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman Mara H. Benjamin Abigail Gillman. A History of German Jewish Bible Translation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 320 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000722 German Jewish Bible translation, like many other aspects of German Jewish cultural and intellectual production, has long taken up an outsized place in Jewish historiography. All the more striking, then, that Abigail Gillman charts an unusual path in this well-worn terrain. Indeed, her volume defamiliarizes that terrain with an argument that expands and fills in critical gaps in the scholarly consensus. Her work offers a comprehensive understanding of a set of literary and cultural projects that occupied the intellectual energy of so many German Jews. Gillman's volume considers the history of German Jewish Bible translation in four parts. Each of the main chapters juxtaposes several (roughly) contemporaneous Bible translations. The chapters trace what Gillman calls the major "waves" in Jewish Bible translation, starting in the late seventeenth century and ending in the early twentieth. The usual suspects are here, of course: Gillman cannot but include Moses Mendelssohn's Bi'ur (1783) and Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig's Die fünf Bücher der Weisung (1925–27). As she tells us in the preface, she initially undertook her study to test Gunther Plaut's famous framing of [End Page 477] these two Bible translations as the symbolic "bookends" of German Jewish Bible translation—an image that was then applied to the course of modern German Jewry as a whole. In the end, Gillman does not completely jettison the metaphor. Instead, by examining the middle of the bookshelf—where sit the translation projects of Leopold Zunz and Joseph Johlson, of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Ludwig Philippson—she brings new complexity to how we read those bookends. Furthermore, Gillman analyzes the literary interlocutors of the famous Bi'ur and the Buber-Rosenzweig translation: two Yiddish translations of the Bible (1678–79) and Bertha Pappenheim's Zeenah u-reenah (1930). Gillman's argument centers on the claim that each wave gains its coherence through the common aesthetic, literary, educational, or cultural orientation characterizing the translations produced in a certain period—even if the resulting works read quite differently. In most cases, the translators she considers rejected or criticized the approach taken by the others in a given wave. But Gillman aims to demonstrate that the historical situation that gave rise to each wave lends a deeper unity to the projects, and that in spite of "conspicuous differences" between the projects, each group shares a "fundamental agenda" (17). The ample and well-chosen images from the Bible translations under consideration, as in the juxtaposition of Philippson's and Hirsch's representations of the menorah in the tabernacle (191–93), offer crucial evidence for and enliven the argument throughout the book. The first chapter, focusing on Jewish Enlightenment Bibles, challenges the long-held preeminence of the first Jewish translation of the Bible into German, Mendelssohn's Bi'ur, by reminding us that it was one in a series of Jewish Enlightenment Bibles. The two late-seventeenth-century Yiddish translations discussed in this chapter, both published in Amsterdam, shaped Mendelssohn's translations, and not always in the ways scholars have accepted. Gillman argues that the Yiddish translations, a century earlier, were in fact less "traditional" than Mendelssohn's: they swept commentary off the printed page, for instance, where Mendelssohn gives ample space to commentary (namely his own). Yet the Yiddish translations under consideration shared the goals that came to be widely associated with the Haskalah. Mendelssohn, even as he moved decisively away from Yiddish, "reclaimed the pedagogical-religious mandate of the Old Yiddish translation tradition" (85). The chapter traces the development of Mendelssohn's translational approach, highlights the importance of German Christian Pietist Bible translations that flourished in the seventeenth century, and meticulously compares each work's translational choices. (This chapter, unlike the others, unfortunately does not include the Hebrew verses alongside the different translations.) The second chapter, "The Emergence of a Bible Industry," considers the proliferation of German translations that appeared in the period 1831–41. These translations, Gillman argues, styled themselves as alternatives to (and...

The Church Slavonic Song of Songs Translated from a Jewish Source in the Ruthenian Codex from the 1550s (RSL Mus. 8222)

Abstract This paper presents the new and actually the first diplomatic publication of the unique 16th-century copy of the Church Slavonic Song of Songs translated from a Jewish original, most likely not the proper Masoretic Text but apparently its Old Yiddish translation. This Slavonic translation is extremely important for Judaic-Slavic relations in the context of literature and language contacts between Jews and Slavs in medieval Slavia Orthodoxa.

A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman

Reviewed by: A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman Ran HaCohen (bio) A History of German Jewish Bible Translation By Abigail Gillman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 332 pp. Within merely a century and a half, from the late eighteenth century to the early years of the Nazi regime, the relatively small German-speaking Jewish minority in Central Europe produced a dozen different German translations of the entire Hebrew Bible, as well as many more partial ones. No other Jewish diaspora, to this day, has been more prolific in the field of bible translation. The impact of these translations has gone far beyond the German Jewish sphere: Mendelssohn's Be'ur was intensively received in Eastern Europe for many generations, whereas S. R. Hirsch's German Pentateuch was published twice in English, and Everette Fox's modern-day English translation follows the principles of Buber and Rosenzweig's German Bible—neither of which (as well as other many English Jewish bibles) are mentioned in David Daniell's formidable The Bible in English (2003). Quite a few scholarly essays have treated one or several of these German translations; Abigail Gillman's, however, is the first full-fledged book to offer a history of German Jewish bible translation as a whole. Gillman divides the translations she discusses into four consecutive "waves." The first wave expectedly includes Mendelssohn's translation, but starts, significantly, with the Yiddish translations of Blitz and of Witzenhausen, published in Amsterdam a century before the Be'ur. Taken together, these works constitute the revolutionary "Jewish Enlightenment Bibles," the roots of which can be traced back to the Reformation and Luther, whose German translation influenced, directly or otherwise, all Yiddish and German Jewish bibles. [End Page 365] The chapter on the second wave discusses the translations of Joseph Johlson, Gotthold Salomon, Leopold Zunz, and Salomon Herxheimer, all of which were published in the 1830s and 1840s and aimed at Germanspeaking Jews "for whom traditional Judaism had lost its innate appeal" (87). Philologically informed and a reaction to Mendelssohn's, these translations were literal and foreignizing, and their authors sought to "invent a more Hebrew-sounding German Jewish biblical idiom" (99). Their focus was predominantly on the biblical text itself, with very little paratext. The third wave includes the two highly popular translations of respectively Jewish liberal and Modern-Orthodox leaders, Ludwig Philippson and S. R. Hirsch, published in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite denominational differences, these works reveal a visually striking similarity: Unlike their predecessors of the second wave, both Philippson and Hirsch added a comprehensive commentary, in some cases almost dwarfing the bilingual biblical text itself. Additionally, Philippson's bible is extensively illustrated. Whereas Philippson anchored his commentary in an encyclopedic knowledge of "the Orient," constructing what Gillman terms "a national story," Hirsch in his commentary turned his readers' attention inward, to the minute phonetic nuances of the Hebrew text. Both Philippson and Hirsch, Gillman claims, turned the bible into a Gesamtkunstwerk. The fourth and last wave includes, expectedly, the Buber-Rosenzweig famous Verdeutschung [Germanization] of the Bible, and the much less obvious choice of Berta Pappenheim's translation of the Yiddish Frauenbibel [women's bible] Zeenah u-Reenah, an adaptation of the Genesis stories. Both twentieth-century translations offer a radical break with the tradition outlined by the previous waves. Buber in particular stressed the need to listen to the "naked" bible, stripped of a thousand years of reading and interpretation. Each translation of the bible stands at a crossroads of numerous factors: religious, philological, cultural, social, even commercial. Gillman's discussion seems to leave little untouched: from comparative textual analysis, through the paratextual level of introductions, commentary, and visual aspects, on to the biographies of the translator, their cultural [End Page 366] environment, both Jewish and (too often neglected in previous studies) Christian, up to the contemporary reception and later legacies. While Mendelssohn's and Buber-Rosenzweig's translations have been the subject of much earlier scholarship, their respective lesser-known counterparts (the translation into or from Yiddish, i.e., Blitz-Witzenhausen and Pappenheim) add an illuminating aspect to the discussion of the first and fourth waves. The...

The Word of the Lord to Shylock

Dror Abend-David’s Scorned My Nation in its comparative literary analysis of the German, Yiddish and Hebrew translations of The Merchant of Venice concludes that cultural context and political intentions changed dramatically between the two Hebrew translations in 1921 and 1972, limiting his textual analysis to the closing line of Shylock’s famous speech: ‘it shall go hard’. I examine two key words in that speech in the two translations to detect which biblical texts the translator called on, consciously or unconsciously, and gauge what the literary resources of the Hebrew language can make of Shylock and his complaint and whether the language portraying Shylock and his complaint did actually change over those fifty years.

The Word of the Lord to Shylock

Abstract Dror Abend-David’s Scorned My Nation in its comparative literary analysis of the German, Yiddish and Hebrew translations of The Merchant of Venice concludes that cultural context and political intentions changed dramatically between the two Hebrew translations in 1921 and 1972, limiting his textual analysis to the closing line of Shylock’s famous speech: ‘it shall go hard’. I examine two key words in that speech in the two translations to detect which biblical texts the translator called on, consciously or unconsciously, and gauge what the literary resources of the Hebrew language can make of Shylock and his complaint and whether the language portraying Shylock and his complaint did actually change over those fifty years.

Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium 1900–1970

Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium 1900–1970

Meditations on a Monkey-Face: Monsters, Transgressed Boundaries, and Contested Hierarchies in a Yiddish Eulenspiegel

This paper discusses an early-eighteenth-century Yiddish translation of the famous early modern Schwankroman (jest-novel), Eulenspiegel . The uniqueness of the translation lies in its incorporation of five distinct tales, which do not appear in any other extant Jewish or non-Jewish edition. Four of these original tales feature monstrous creatures, such as cynocephali (dog-headed men), strong, venomous women, and monkey-faced men. The article offers a close reading of these monstrous creatures, revealing how they serve to unpack concerns surrounding problems of transgressed borders and confused hierarchies, which were shared by many of the unnamed Yiddish translator's Jewish and non-Jewish contemporaries. I offer a review of these anxieties, locating them against their wider cultural background, and tracing their unique manifestations within the Jewish—and particularly Yiddish—literary realm. I argue that there was something special about writing monstrosity in Yiddish, and particularly in a Yiddish translation of a German work. A hybrid genre, formed by the unnatural coupling of separate tongues, literature, cultures, classes, and genders—Yiddish literature was a monstrous creation in its own right; an almost natural breeding ground for monsters.

‘Strange Rendering:’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish and the Staging of Race at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

‘Strange Rendering:’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish and the Staging of Race at the Turn of the Twentieth Century1 Rachel Rubinstein (bio) While the scholarly literature on Black-Jewish relations continues to expand, its archive has remained remarkably unchanged. Although recent explorations of representations of African Americans in American Yiddish literature and American Hebrew literature have newly revealed the ways in which immigrants in the early twentieth century engaged critically and creatively with race in the United States across languages, much work remains to be done.2 Curiously, while many scholars mention in passing the translations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Yiddish, very few have elaborated further on the consumption of this iconographic national text among Yiddish readers.3 There is even further silence on the subject of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the Yiddish stage, first in Yiddish literary and theatrical criticism at the time and consequently in contemporary Yiddish studies scholarship, reflecting historical biases against performances deemed middlebrow or lowbrow and the subsequent gaps in modern scholarly accounts.4 As theater historian John Frick notes, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not just a popular piece of abolitionist fiction; rather, it became a “cultural, commercial, ideological, and theatrical phenomenon,” arguably super-intending [End Page 35] representations of racial difference and racial justice for a full century to come.5 For this reason, seemingly narrow considerations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin can, in fact, open up broader histories of racialization, racial representations and interracial interactions in American culture. Yiddish performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the turn of the twentieth century received increased attention from drama critics in English, because they coincided with a large-scale theatrical revival of the original 1853 melodrama in Anglophone American theaters, even as bowdlerized Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows were ubiquitous. Even African American newspapers took note of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish, with the Freeman noting in 1902: “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ in Yiddish again last Saturday at the People’s Theatre. Big hit.”6 And again, a few weeks later: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin was produced in Yiddish again Saturday 19, at the People’s Theatre. Sherman H. Dudley was in charge of the colored contingent.”7 In this essay, I begin the work of situating the Yiddish versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the context first of the publication history of Stowe’s novel and the many plays that were adapted from it, and then in the context of the broader history of racial performances on the popular stage at the turn of the twentieth century. Taken together, the Yiddish translations and adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (particularly the discourse in English around Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish), and black performances of Jewish voices and bodies further illuminate Jewish engagements with American national mythmaking, the positioning of Jews and blacks, and the relationship of language to bodies, in the turn-of-the-century racial imagination. Literary Translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin While Yiddish literary scholars often cite Yiddish translations of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin as evidence of Jews’ “special interest” in the fate of African Americans, the truth is that these translations were belated in comparison to the translation history of Stowe’s novel. In its first year of book publication, translations appeared in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Flemish, Polish, and Magyar. These [End Page 36] translations weren’t meant only for an overseas readership; in the 1850s, both Stowe and her publishers understood that the novel would have to be translated for the roughly 15 percent of American readers who were foreign-born.8 Stowe herself commissioned the first German translation in 1852, understanding that for the novel to wield its full political power, even within the nation, she would have to rely on translation. By 1860, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been translated into twenty languages and was the most widely circulated work of American literature.9 In fact, American literary scholar Colleen Boggs argues that Stowe’s efforts to control the rapidly proliferating translations and adaptations of her novel helped to form the basis for international copyright law.10 Eastern European...

The Publication and Dissemination of the Yehoash Bible, 1922–1942

At Czernowitz Conference on Yiddish Language in 1908, Isaac L. Peretz called for the translation into Yiddish of all our cultural treasures from our free, golden primarily translation into Yiddish of Bible.1 As Peretz was speaking these words, a translation attempt was already underway on other side of Atlantic. The famed Russian-American translator and Solomon Bloomgarden (1870-1927), better known by his pen name Yehoash, published his Yiddish translation of books of Isaiah, Esther, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Ruth in 1911. However, Yehoash, who had immigrated to America in 1890 and was described in a 1923 New York Times book review as greatest living poet of Yiddish language,2 was unsatisfied with these translations. He redoubled his translation efforts, relocating with his wife, Flora, and daughter, Evlin (Chava), to Palestine in 1913. There, he intended to absorb into his sensitive soul atmosphere of country which produced Bible, as well as learn classical Arabic and Syriac, which contributed to his linguistic understanding of Hebrew Bible text.3 (Alternative reasons for trip included Yehoash's long-held dream of living in Land of Israel, and need to improve his fragile health, a result of previously suffering from tuberculosis.)4 The outbreak of First World War forced Bloomgardens to leave Palestine, and they returned to United States in 1915. in New York, in addition to publishing a lengthy, three-part memoir about his journey, From New York to Rehovot and Back (1917), Yehoash continued and at last completed his Yiddish Bible translation. Critics hailed work as a masterpiece, first modern, literary translation of Bible into Yiddish, and this Bible translation remains project for which Yehoash is best remembered today.The Yehoash Bible went through three main stages of publication and dissemination, mostly during interwar period: partial serialization in Yiddish-language New York daily newspaper Der Tog (1922-1925); appearance in book form (Yiddish only), first as eight-volume set released incrementally from 1927 to 1937, then as a two-volume set (1938); and, finally, release of a two-volume, bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish edition in February 1940 (reprinted in 1942, 1946, and 1957). The work of publication and dissemination ultimately turned out to be a family affair. Yehoash himself only lived to see first two Yiddish volumes of his translation (the Pentateuch) in book form. After his death, his widow continued work of editing and seeing books to print. Flora Bloomgarden-or Flora Yehoash, as she was also known-edited and released additional four volumes (two volumes of Early Prophets, two volumes of Later Prophets) before she too passed away in 1934. Following Flora's death, Bloomgardens' only child, Evlin, took over reins of organization responsible for continuing her father's legacy, Yehoash Publication Society, wresting it legally from hands of its indifferent stockholders. She renamed operation Yehoash Farlag Gezelshaft, exact Yiddish translation of its original name (hereafter referred to as YFG).5 Over next seven years, she and her husband, Ben Dworkin, tried, dedicatedly and often desperately, to complete work that her parents had left unfinished.Recently, scholars have explored Yehoash's literary and cultural motivations for his Bible translation work, noting that translation was intended to contribute to a burgeoning modern secular Jewish culture as well as to make Bible accessible to Yiddish-speaking masses.6 Shlomo Berger has argued that Yehoash wish[ed] to be modern, secular, and progressive, and nevertheless [felt] that Yiddish could not escape its religious Jewish past, describing translator's approach as an act of poetic betrayal.7 Ultimately, Yehoash not only preserved a significant number of Hebrew words within Yiddish translation, but he also did not do away with religious writings or Yiddish dialects. …

An Alternative Version of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith

The subject of this article is an early socialist pamphlet in the form of a parody on Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. The pamphlet was written by Morris Winchevsky in Hebrew and first published in London in 1885. The text is regarded as the first in a series of socialist and anarchist satirical pamphlets that were written in the period 1885–1910. In 1903 the text was republished in another pamphlet, together with a Yiddish translation. The main focus of this article will be on this second version and the differences between the original Hebrew text and its Yiddish translation.

The Discovery and Publication of Joseph Perl’s Yiddish Writings

The attitude of Tarnopol satirist Joseph Perl (1773–1839) towards the Yiddish language has been discussed by a number of scholars. In particular, researchers have examined his views with regard to his most well-known satire, Sefer Megaleh temirin, which was printed in Hebrew in Vienna, 1819, with a partial Yiddish translation of the work appearing in Vilna, 1938. However, there remains much to be said concerning the creative process which guided Perl’s writing in Yiddish, as well as the later discovery and publication of his Yiddish works, both of which are chapters in the wider story of the development of Yiddish literature in the first half of the nineteenth century and the increasing scholarly interest in it at the outset of the twentieth century. This article briefly describes these multifaceted matters and then offers suggestions for the future study of Perl’s writing in particular, and maskilic Yiddish literature in general.

A Note on the Opening Sentence of Pirqei Avot in Two Eighteenth-Century Yiddish Editions of the Tract

The opening sentence of Pirqei Avot evokes a history of Torah transmission which is also of particular importance in legitimizing the existence and roles of the Oral Torah as an integral section of Torah. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, Yiddish translators of the tract frequently expanded the original Hebrew text while following the strategy of Yiddish translations of the Bible known as Khumesh mit khiber, or ‘a Yiddish rendition with additions’: a Yiddish version of the Hebrew text aimed at providing its reading public a coherent text to understand in their Ashkenazi vernacular. As may be expected, the boundaries between translation and commentary were consequently blurred, but the Yiddish version was nevertheless considered as a translation of the original Hebrew text.

‘Dos Lid funem Hemd’: A Yiddish Translation of a Classic Victorian Poem

Yiddish proletarian poet Morris Winchevsky translated ‘Song of the Shirt,’ a classic Victorian poem by Thomas Hood. This article examines Winchevsky’s Yiddish translation verse by verse, looking at Winchevsky’s choice of Yiddish words that convey, enhance, or alter Hood’s meaning. The article demonstrates Winchevsky’s facility in language and translation, and his ability to create a distinctly Yiddish version of a classic English poem.

Das jischev fun Nar-husen: Jiddische Narrenliteratur und jüdische Narrenkultur

AbstractExploration of the role of folly in medieval and early modern Jewish culture – aside from the festival of Purim and, especially, Purim plays – has been minimal. Looking at Yiddish translations of