Category Yiddish
Trauma Ballads: Blume Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories, translated by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Reviewed by Daniel Kennedy “I am a housewife, a wife, a mother, a grandmother—and a Yiddish writer. I write my stories in Yiddish. [. . . ] Because I speak Yiddish, think in Yiddish. My father and mother, my sisters and brothers, my murdered people seek revenge in Yiddish.” (215) There was a time when […]
Glossing a Vanished World: S. An-sky’s Pioneers, Translated by Rose Waldman
Reviewed by Ellen Cassedy On a dark afternoon in the late 19th century, a lurching vehicle rounds the bend into a small Eastern European town: “A large, ungainly coach, a sort of Noah’s ark stuffed with passengers, lumbered slowly and with difficulty down the wide, muddy roads of the town of Miloslavka” (23). Out of […]
Close Encounters in the Capital of Yiddishland: Vilna My Vilna by Abraham Karpinowitz, translated from the Yiddish by Helen Mintz
Reviewed by Ellen Cassedy Prostitutes, thieves, racketeers, and gangsters populate the short stories of Abraham Karpinowitz. But as translator Helen Mintz points out, the main character in his work is the city itself. “Vilna” to the Jews, “Wilno” to the Poles, “Vilnius” to the Lithuanians, it was a polyglot city, the site of multiple “crossings” […]