Celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month with Yiddish Fiction in Translation

In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, here are some books to check out from Brooklyn Public Library that are Yiddish fiction in translation. You will find the themes in these stories are not foreign to today’s reader; they focus on the immigrant experience, women’s issues, love, fitting in and standing out, and the inner mind.

Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories was written by the Galician-born Yiddish female writer Blume Lempel (1907-1999) and translated from Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub. Lempel moved to Paris in 1929 and emigrated to the United States in 1939 thanks to her husband’s foresight of the unstable political situation. The couple made it safely to Brooklyn shortly before Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940. Lempel began to write short stories, but when news came that the rest of her immediate family was murdered in Europe in the hands of the Nazis, Blume was paralyzed by their fate, and stopped writing for some time. With the encouragement of a friend, she started to write in Yiddish again even when there existed so few readers compared to before the Holocaust.

Her new literary calling was to “speak for those who could no longer speak, feel for those who could no longer feel, immerse myself in their unlived lives, their sorrows, their joys, their struggled and their death.”

Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories explores tough topics such as a woman getting an abortion on an operating table in Paris.

From the Jewish Provinces was written by the Galician-born poet and prose writer Fradel Shtok (1880?-1990?). Shtok was always credited as being a great poet, but wasn’t recognized as being a prose writer even though she published a short story collection and had never published a collection of poetry. Within Yiddish language circles, this was no surprise; women writers were more likely to be seen as poets than prose writers which excluded them from some literary circles.

More than one hundred years after publication, Shtok’s short stories were translated into English by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter. Shtok's strikingly poetic prose highlights themes her contemporary female writers didn’t touch. Many of them only wrote about the modern woman in America on the dating scene or living as an immigrant, but Shtok reaches back into the Old World to tell the stories of traditional Jewish women living in the shtetlekh. For example, two stories in her collection are about hair, and women's desire to show their hair when it was not an accepted practice for traditional Jewish married women.

Fear and Other Stories was written by Chana Blanksteyn (~1860-1939), who was educated in French and German but lived in Vilna, a city comprised mostly of Polish and Jewish populations during the interwar period. Blanksteyn didn’t learn Yiddish until she was older, and stood in solidarity of what Yiddish meant to so many Jews at that time. It was seen as the language of the masses, one that asserted the Jewish people were an ethnic minority with a linguistic and cultural identity. She advocated for women, speaking out against human trafficking and for vocational learning opportunities.

Blanksteyn died of illness two weeks after her short story collection was published, and a month before Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1939. Her collection of short stories was one of the last printed in Vilna, and her readership would be annihilated simply because they were Jewish. Only two copies of her collection have ever been found in the United States. It is incredible her stories survived at all and we are so lucky to now have them in translation.

Blanksteyn’s stories are modern, both in content and style, sharing the same free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness as her contemporary, Virginia Woolf. The stories center on professional men and women, living under unstable governments, sometimes struggling with their Jewish identities in a modern world where they have otherwise rejected the traditions of their religion.

Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle against Free Love was written by the Minsk-born writer Miriam Karpilove (1888-1956). She emigrated to the United States when she was a teenager and was able to support herself as a Yiddish writer, which not many female Yiddish writers were able to do. She supplemented her income by retouching photographs, and from the surviving photographs that exist of her, we can assume she loved being in front of the camera as much as working with them. Diary of a Lonely Girl, translated by Jessica Kirzane, was one of her most popular novels and asked whether a young woman can be sexually independent and also valued by society. The novel's introduction alone is worth reading, as it gives some historical context to free love as a radical idea that Karpilove rejects despite living a bohemian lifestyle herself.

Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature is a compilation of 50 short stories for children and adults featuring Jewish holidays, heroes, folk tales and fables, translated in English by Miriam Udel. These stories span a period from the 1910s to the 1970s and come from around the world, including stories that were never before shared in English. The title is a reference to an old tradition where young boys who were about to begin their formal Jewish education would literally lick honey off the Hebrew letters, teaching them at a young age that the words of the Torah are quite sweet! Readers of this collection are certainly in for a treat.

For a comprehensive list of Yiddish fiction in translation at Brooklyn Public Library, including the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer—the only writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in Yiddish—click here.