Miriam Karpilove (1888-1956) wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when Yiddish women authors were gaining entrance to the world of Yiddish prose, a form from which they had been largely absent. Karpilove’s epistolary novel Judith: A Tale of Love and Woe (1911) was composed during a vibrant moment of this minority language’s literary history, when Yiddish literature was carving a new path as a modern world literature after the death of the “classic” Yiddish writers. In this literary succession, the emerging generation of Yiddish modernists considered the figure of the young Jewish woman as a mirror of modernity; such figures evolved from past typical depictions of them as mere secondary characters which served to prop up the development of male protagonists. In new representations of the modernized Jewish woman, Yiddish women authors were particularly able to provide a poignant subjectivity, writing female characters who were complex and autonomous protagonists.
And Karpilove’s Judith is certainly both complex and autonomous, as she demonstrates in the series of eighty-four letters which comprise the novel and are addressed to her revolutionary lover Joseph. These letters span five years and two continents, from Tsarist Russia to the United States. In Judith’s portrayal, the figure of the Jewish woman becomes not only potent for Karpilove as a literary symbol teeming with modernist potentiality, but also as a proxy figure for the experiences of actual young Jewish immigrant women. Karpilove’s work is particularly attuned to the difficulties for young Jewish women navigating between the old and new world along a barrage of shifting cultural ideas regarding appropriate and desirable expressions of femininity. Her deep commitment to exposing the illusory promises of modern progress along gender lines is especially apparent in Judith, as the protagonist acts against a backdrop of almost dizzying cultural possibilities vying for her participation.
As the subtitle A Tale of Love and Woe suggests, the romance between Judith and Joseph is permeated with calamity, further revealed in the novel’s opening frame story: Judith’s letters are found on Joseph’s person after his suicide in Central Park, alongside the dead man’s written wish that these letters be published “as a memorial to the broken heart of an innocent woman” (9). This literary conceit of the frame story and the novel’s epistolary form encourage readers to view Judith as a tragic figure, one whose most intimate thoughts are ostensibly laid bare through her letters.
The melodramatic elements which Karpilove employs bely the consistently political thrust of the work: indeed, politics come to the fore even in Judith’s initial letter, wherein she recalls the couple’s first meeting and a simultaneously charming and unsettling tête-a-tête (Joseph’s interest in Judith’s shtetl is connected to his desire to establish a nationalist group there). The foundational elements of their fledgling romance are established during this conversation. After they discuss the differences between “thinkers” and “do-ers” in bringing about social change, Joseph’s analysis of her – which makes her both “proud and a little unsettled” (14) – prompts him to notice her resemblance to apocryphal Judith who beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes. His query of whether she would have successfully taken the same actions, and Judith’s reply that she would be able “to save my people” (14), elevates the Judith of the shtetl to a mythical representation of exemplary Jewish womanhood, irrevocably coloring the expectations of the relationship, even as her name as ethnonym (Judith from Yehudi, as “Jewish woman”) allows her also to function as archetype and paradigm of the young Eastern European Jewish woman.
In addition to Joseph’s impossible expectations of her as Jewish heroine par excellence, Judith’s letters, which often quote Joseph’s own and rebut them, reveal his presumption that she should also function as a representative patterning of the bourgeois figure in European literature. As Judith navigates her role as a lover in accordance with Joseph’s assumptions, as well as her desire to fulfill her role as a dutiful daughter of the shtetl for her family, even more tension emerges in a series of disorienting events. Her letters, wherein she mediates between the disparate expectations imposed upon her, also reveal her ethical impetus which emerges from her experiences and her careful contemplation of them. Her selfhood, which she at first conceals in embellished language evoking the hackneyed models from a brivnsteller, a Yiddish letter manual, evolves into something more profound and multidimensional.
Through Judith’s life, Karpilove is able to explore pressing issues of Jewish modernity, such as revolutionary politics, antisemitism, pogroms, Jewish self-defense leagues, Zionism, language politics, emigration and acculturation. In keeping with her particular focus on matters which had the most effect on women, Karpilove also uses the voice of Judith to examine the shift to companionate marriages, sexual violence, and sexual politics. Karpilove (and Judith) is especially conscious of the cultural emergence of “The New Woman” and “free love,” the latter of which was liberating and beguiling in its appearance, but spurious in its actuality. Karpilove later explores this tension more fully in Diary of a Lonely Girl (serialized 1916-1918), her most celebrated novel. Through the figure of Judith, Karpilove reveals that the emancipatory and inclusionary promises are a façade: even in new opportunities which emerged for women at the time outside of traditional spheres, women would always be the ones disadvantaged.
Karpilove earned more fame in her lifetime than most Yiddish women writers. The leading expert on Karpilove, Jessica Kirzane, has done much to bring Karpilove to a new generation of readers in the twenty-first century. Several of Karpilove’s essays and articles were published in English from 2019-2022), as well as the serialized novel Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle against Free Love (Syracuse Press) in 2020, Judith in 2022 (Farlag Press), and A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press) in 2023. They were all translated by Kirzane.
Kirzane’s vast understanding of Karpilove undergirds her translation of Judith, through the way in which she maintains both the dramatic undertones of Judith’s letters and their psychological richness while the heroine mediates her thoughts through paradoxical concealment and openness. Kirzane bridges the gap effectively between the readers for whom Karpilove originally wrote, and for those of us who have the pleasure of discovering Karpilove in this century. She even includes a short glossary to retain particular words necessary for the context (such as words related to Russian politics or Jewish literature and history), broadening the accessiblility of the text. Her translation successfully manages the tension inherent in the text between its melodramic and comedic effect, the latter conveyed through Judith’s biting wit and sarcasm; ultimately, the careful attention which Kirzane pays to Judith’s style brings out the variegated aspects of the heroine’s character. One such example occurs after an argument, when Judith responds to a petulant letter of Joseph’s:
I offer you no apologies. You can compare me, if you want, to my mother or my grandmother. They were also “indifferent” women. They didn’t lose their way, they didn’t pursue the pleasures of the moment. But their love was true, it was lifelong devotion. Would you rather that I was like the other, more ‘modern’ women? (59-60)
Here, the translation encapsulates Judith’s need to mediate between gentleness and reproach, between accommodating her lover’s expectations and maintaining her own moral commitments.
Throughout the text, Kirzane renders Judith legible for contemporary readers in English, allowing us to empathize with both the specific situation in which she finds herself, as a young immigrant Jewish woman of the early twentieth century, and the universal angst one encounters while toggling personal considerations and interpersonal relationships.
Through Kirzane’s meticulous translation, all the moods of Judith become legible; we see her as she navigates amongst feeling hopeful, opinionated, passionate, logical, meditative, soothing, vexed, exasperated, and desperate. In her letters, Judith shows her multidimensional identity as it emerges through her experiences with the politically-charged historical moment in which she finds herself, and Kirzane’s translation underscores each of Judith’s sides.
Ameliah Leonhardt: There’s a current push for Yiddish women writers of prose to finally get the attention that they deserve. My question for you is: why Karpilove? You put so much effort and time into making Karpilove’s work accessible for contemporary readers. What does Karpilove represent for you in terms of our understanding of Yiddish literature? In your translator’s note for Diary of a Lonely Girl, you also mentioned the serendipitous way in which you discovered her, and how that sort of set you on the trajectory. Can you expand on that?
Jessica Kirzane: First of all, I’m hesitant to use the word “discover” because Karpilove was already there and people knew about her. I want to be very careful about acknowledging those people and all the work that they did to preserve her archive and to digitize her writings, without which my – what felt like a discovery – would have been impossible. It was all sort of there, and Karpilove did some of this work herself, too, preserving correspondence and keeping a record of her writing, and that has made my project, if not possible, much easier.
One reason why it’s good to work on Karpilove is a really pragmatic one: she’s actually a relatively easy writer to research because she left such a thorough record in her archive. In her personal archive at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, there are two handwritten lists of everything she ever wrote, what newspaper and when, and that makes it possible to get a fuller sense of the writing life of one individual writer, especially someone much of whose work didn’t appear in book form, but in newspapers. When I started this project, there were fewer digital projects than we have now. For instance, shund.org, Saul Noam Zarrit’s project to gather installments of serialized novels in one searchable place, now makes this kind of work simpler. Just a few years ago it would have been impossible, really, to go through all of the newspapers, or not impossible, but it would have taken a lot of time to go through all the newspapers via microfilm and find everything she ever wrote, evaluate it, get a kind of sense of it, and choose which stories I wanted to translate. It would have been much more haphazard and piecemeal, except that she left this wonderful record.
Something that I find really special about Karpilove is her particular sense of humor. She has this extremely sharp, cynical, gutsy sense of humor, a really striking, unique tone that I associate, fairly or not, as being somewhat more stereotypically masculine. I think of her as someone who started off primarily as a humorist. Some of her earliest work in the newspapers was writing jokes and aphorisms. And you can feel that – this punchiness – that is maybe really different from what readers expect of women writers. They expect a kind of lyricism, sentimentalism, and there is some of that sometimes, but even when it’s there, there’s a little part of her that’s poking around the side, making fun of it. She’s playing with us. She knows what we expect of her, and she knows that she’s doing something a little bit different, and she’s kind of angry about it. And I like all of that tension. It’s really exciting to engage with a writer who is challenging her reader, is daring the reader to argue with her. So I think that’s one of the things that she gives to us, is this provocative, audacious portrait of Jewish womanhood that maybe we wouldn’t get in the same way elsewhere.
I also like that she wrote for many years, and that she wrote about the experience of being a woman writer. She wrote about writing for newspapers. She was very self-referential, so we can get little snippets of not just the kind of material experience – although I think that’s important – but also the emotional experience of being a woman writer in the Yiddish newspapers, in the Yiddish literary world. I also like that later in her career she writes about older women. She writes about widows and divorce and kind of the day-to-day things that she maybe imagined her readers were experiencing.
And I like that she is mostly interested in people, but that the politics are there, the history is there. It is extremely relevant to what she is writing about, and she puts it always in the background because her interest is consistently women, and I said “people,” but really she’s interested in women, their emotional lives, and their hypocrisies. She thinks women are funny and endlessly interesting, and I appreciate that she’s not pretending. She is who she is. She’s putting it all out: her observations, her humor, her skepticism is all there on the page all the time, whatever context she’s writing about.
AL: In your afterward, you refer to Judith as a “tragedy of communication,” which is so poignant. We’re supposed to have access to Judith’s thought, even when we know they’re mediated, and we’re supposed to sympathize with her, but we’re also sort of playing the role of Joseph as the recipient of the letters (and she’s also constantly navigating how she wants to come across to him. She has to be very careful in how she portrays herself). Did the subtext within the novel pose particular challenges for translating, or did the act of translating itself enable you to see Judith in a more accurate way than someone who’s just reading the text?
JK: I think kind of both. I would read it multiple times and try to decide: how sly is she being? How much is Joseph supposed to understand what she’s saying, and what does it mean that she’s saying things that are kind of like a wink, where, women will understand, but Joseph doesn’t. We’re supposed to see Joseph as a kind of a jerk who doesn’t understand or care about women, and so she’s able to communicate things to us as readers, about Joseph and his inability to understand, as well as about her protagonist, all through this veiled or hemmed-in language. It reminds me a lot of my experience of reading Jane Austen, where there’s very constrained, formal language, but the delight in reading it is in understanding the really serious and weighty, emotional implications of all that is not said. Probably reading (Judith) so many times and thinking about how to convey the things that are not on the page did help me to develop at least a sympathy, or even a fellow feeling with, I don’t know if it’s with Karpilove or with Judith, that we were both doing the same thing of trying to figure out how to use words, not to say something, and also to say it at the same time. That was challenging, and I still sort of second guess whether I did it correctly, or whether I was over reading.
AL: The thing I appreciate the most about the text is it appears to be a melodramatic, overly romanticized tragedy. But there’s so much going on underneath the surface, where, if you read it just even one time, you think “This is just so typical.” But no, it’s really not. She’s doing something special in this text.
JK: The tragic frame is very typical, right? It feels very overwritten and over the top, but Karpilove is quite a shrewd writer, and she’s often making fun of the things she’s writing as she’s writing them, and she’s definitely making fun of Judith herself for being so naive. Karpilove has some straight up melodramas. Brokhe a Kleyn-Shtetldike [Brokhe, a small-town Girl] is one of the novels that I haven’t translated, which is much more a plain melodrama.
But this Judith feels closer to things that Karpilove actually wants to say, which is, “Yes, these tragedies are real, and people suffer from them, and they matter, and we should care about them, and also the people who suffer from them might be just as silly as the people who perpetuate them, because people are silly.”
AL: You mentioned in the afterword that you really wanted to translate this after the emotional high of translating Diary of a Lonely Girl, and that you wanted to get to her earlier work and style. Now that you’ve translated such a wide swath of her work, how does this text, in terms of style or tone feel different or the same? And how does Judith compare to her other protagonists in her other work?
JK: As she got more experienced, the humor becomes much less veiled and much more direct. I think Diary of a Lonely Girl was a breakthrough for her, and she becomes associated with a kind of scandalous writing, a kind of openness about sexuality, or kind of a titillating novel. I think that put her into a kind of limelight as a writer who was brazen, but she did not have that reputation yet with the earlier novel Judith, and she’s not brazen with Judith. For instance, the one moment when Joseph is trying to convince her to have sex with him is very veiled. Karpilove is always euphemistic. Even later she never writes explicit sex scenes, but she becomes known for pushing the envelope of that a little bit. Later on in life, her writing becomes more bitter and also more confident. She is able to be more direct in her critique of social phenomena, of the politics of writing, and about writers in general, and expectations readers have about the situation of the Yiddish language.
Even just in the letters and correspondence that I’ve read from her, in the beginning, she’s not sure that she’ll be a writer, that people will read her stuff, and she’s hoping they will. There’s this kind of longing or desire or something that happens, but later on, she thinks that she is very deserving and underpaid and underappreciated, and so that kind of confidence comes through in her writing, of “Everybody should be reading this, so I’m going to write it, and who cares what you think.” There’s a kind of almost defiance in the tone, which I don’t think you really see in Judith.
AL: Since you had already done quite a bit of translation with her before you came to this text, did you feel that you knew her quite well, or that this feels very different than the others? This text seems so daytshmerish [i.e., very dependent on German vocabulary and orthography], and I’m trying to get a sense of whether she was sort of working with conventions of Yiddish at the time, or whether she’s doing something particular, if the German influence is as prevalent in her later works.
JK: I definitely felt like I knew her. In order, my translation of Judith was published before Provincial Newspaper, but in terms of when I translated them, I think I might have translated the novella Provincial Newspaper[which forms the first section of Kirzane’s third collection of writing by Karpilove], and then Judith. My translation of Diary of a Lonely Girl had already been published at that point So, when I came to Judith, I felt confident about getting some of the subtext, because I felt like I understood the narrator, or I understood Karpilove. If I intuited something, I trusted that intuition. I didn’t think as hard about it as I did with Diary of a Lonely Girl, when I had to ask myself, “Is she really saying that? Could she be saying that?” (With Judith), I thought,” Oh, of course, she’s saying that. She’s always saying that.”
In terms of the language. there are a couple of things that are going on. One is that, later on, she starts incorporating a lot more English, because she’s probably speaking and reading a lot more English. Judith is written shortly after she arrives in America. It was quite noticeable to me, having looked at especially Provincial Newspaper and some of the later stuff, especially where English is peppered throughout. There’s a real joy in thinking about and making fun of the various registers of language and kinds of language that people are using. That doesn’t happen as much in Judith, though there are some times when some Russian creeps in that does that a little bit, but not to the same degree: she’s not playing with multilingualism in the same way as she does later on.
She’s also a little bit more shy with wordplay. I think that is a factor of her being a younger writer, maybe a little bit less confident, a little bit more conventional. And I think the daytshmerish is part of convention. She’s writing an epistolary drama, a melodrama, and she’s writing it in the kind of conventional shundroman language. There’s a lot of what maybe you would call daytshmerish, or maybe you would call “newspaper Yiddish” in her later stuff as well, but not to the degree that Judith has, and I think it is about participating in a particular kind of literary convention. You also see it a lot in Brokhe, this other melodrama that she wrote, and in her play In di shturem Teg (In story Days), which was published in 1909 and has a lot more Russian. It’s set outside of Minsk, in the town where she was from, so it feels much less American than some of the later things. You can feel her development and it is a kind of nod to a literary tradition that she’s participating in, or what she’s reading as well.
It might be worth looking at other kinds of epistolary novels as well, because there is something about the epistolary form that is very formulaic. People were writing letters according to a brivnshteler [a manual with formulaic structures for writing letters]. Kind of formulaic conventions, that there’s a proper way to write a letter that has to have a kind of distance to it, and so maybe that’s also part of it, that Judith the character, is meant to be sort of hemmed in by the conventions of writing and by the kind of polite discourse. What she’s doing is already illicit – even writing him a letter is illicit, but should anyone come upon it, it should sound respectable.
AL: Do you have any idea when she would have actually written it?
JK: If I had to guess, I would guess that she wrote it in something like 1909, so after the play comes out, and I know that it took her a while to get it published.
At the same time as she’s writing it, also she was a prolific letter writer herself. She was writing lots of letters especially to her brother and the person who would become her sister-in-law, her cousin Rivka, who, as I understand it, was her best friend. She’s living in rented rooms and with family members in New York City and writing short letters to her brother in Bridgeport and to her cousin, and telling them about her life. And I suspect that Judith is part of that, maybe it emerges from that practice as well, of thinking about how one communicates kind of mundane things of one’s life and also the more important things underneath that. I don’t know for sure, but I would think that she wrote it a couple of years before it was published, when she didn’t yet have the reputation to just publish it.
AL: It seems really intriguing that it was published in the first place as a standalone novel by a woman.
JK: Yeah, yeah. And I don’t know if that maybe had to do with her connections. Her brother Jacob – the one that she was very close to – became a very prominent Zionist leader in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the Poale Tsion movement. And she was the secretary of the local political chapter, I think, pretty much as soon as she came to America. I wonder if that kind of political involvement gave her a network. There were various literary figures who were involved in that political organization, and so that might have given her a leg up because of who she knew in that in that movement…
The newspaper writer and editor Kalmen Marmor, who she met through Poale Tsion, wrote in his memoir that he was trying to cultivate women writers, and lists her as someone he was interested in encouraging. Maybe this interest came from a belief that having women writers demonstrated your egalitarian chops.
It is kind of surprising that she starts getting published so early, but she was one of several women writers in the period. There was a Leah Hoffman who ended up being a mostly known as a poet for children but also was writing for the newspapers at the time. There was Rokhl Loria, who wrote short stories and wrote them in the same pages as Karpilove did, and often their names appeared together in that kind of early moment. Later on, there will be other people that she gets compared to. So her name and Yente Serdatzky’s come up together a lot. They were contemporaries and friends – something I know a lot more about now because of exciting new research on Serdatsky by Dalia Wolfson. She was also writing alongside contemporary writer Sarah Smith, who Saul Noam Zaritt is now researching and translating. She was not alone. There were other women that were being published, and they knew each other, but they were often presented publicly as, “Look, we have a woman.” And so that kind of puts them, even rhetorically, in isolation.
AL: My next question is about Karpilove’s English translation. In the afterword, you wrote about how you navigated between the two, but I’m curious what that moment felt like for you, when you were working in the archives and unearthed her English translation.
JK: I laid my own translation and Karpilove’s out side by side, and some of it was, in fact, really just checking myself. Did I get it right? Was it accurate? Were there individual words or phrases that I’d mistranslated or misunderstood? Sometimes as I read it, we said exactly the same thing, and that was an amazing feeling. And often she was much more formal than I was, and then I had to decide if I wanted to go her way or not. Sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn’t, but a lot of times it helped me clarify what it was that I was doing and why it was different from what she’d done.
I was translating for audiences who were going to read it now, and she was translating it for theoretical audiences who were going to read it in the 1950s and that those readers are different, and the language has changed, and so I’m translating it into our language and not into the language of the 1950s and also, she wasn’t a native English speaker, and maybe her English writing was quite formal because it came from this kind of, like, more studied approach. I wanted to kind of make it sound more like a teenager had written the book or had written these letters. I gave myself the permission to do that.
Also, it was great working with Daniel Kennedy [editor and publisher of Farlag Press], because he’s a wonderful editor. He’s extremely knowledgeable about Yiddish, and he read the Yiddish alongside the English, which is very rare for translations, and offered his own suggestions and was very hands-on. And sometimes I would just put in the marginal comments, “I said this, Miriam says this, which one do you think?” And he would help me pick. And so it felt like Miriam Karpilove was my editor also, alongside Daniel, to some extent – or at least we were all meeting together.
I’m glad that I translated it first, before I turned to Karpilove’s self-translation, because I don’t know that I would have had the audacity to translate it after I read her translation. It is beautiful. Her English is beautiful. But doing it this way, it felt like I had this other opportunity to engage with and think with her.
AL: Because you were able to work with her English translation, do you feel more of an emotional connection to this text, more of an emotional connection to Karpilove through this text than through the other texts of hers that you’ve translated?
JK: It’s hard to say. I felt with each text a strong emotional connection to Karpilove, maybe even a kind of overidentification for different reasons. For The Diary, it was the first time I ever translated someone at that length. It became this very intense relationship between me and this text. And she made me a translator, or it made me a translator. I hadn’t really identified myself as a translator until I did that. It’s a text that a lot of my professional identity has become wrapped up in, maybe that’s the one that I identify with most because it is the one that is most identified with me.
The Provincial Newspaper I just loved translating because I’m an editor! I edit this journal of Yiddish studies, and so it was such a rollicking delight to hear her frustrations about the copy editor, and the press, and whoever the readers are. That was a different kind of identification. And this one, Judith, felt more like I was getting to know more about the author herself than it was about identifying with the text, and that had to do with this translation process of sitting down with her own translation and her translation itself being part of the process.
AL: Thank you for these informative and fascinating answers! We look forward to your future translations and edited works!
Interview slightly edited for length and clarity.
Ameliah Leonhardt is a PhD Candidate in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program for German Studies, which she entered after earning an MA in Religious Studies at Duke. Her research focuses on Jewish identity as a nexus for broader European issues of modernism and gender/sexuality in German Jewish and Yiddish literature in the early twentieth century. Her dissertation project focuses on how women writers, such as Miriam Karpilove, Gertrud Kolmar, Veza Canetti, and Ester Singer Kreytman, subvert Jewish traditions and literary motifs for modernist aims.