2020 Pakn Treger Translation Issue: Yiddish Comes to America

Pakn Treger Digital Translation Issue

Madeleine Cohen Translation Editor

Lisa Newman Executive Editor

Abigail Weaver Translation Managing Editor

Greg Lauzon Copyeditor

Alexander Isley Inc. Art Direction and Design

Cover illustration by Chris Lyons

Support for Pakn Treger comes from

The Joseph and Marion Brechner Fund for Jewish Cultural Reporting

The Charles Corfield Fund for Pakn Treger

The Kaplen Fund for Pakn Treger

The Mark Pinson Fund for Pakn Treger

Copyright in each translation is held by the translator. Copyright for Immigration is held by the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, MA

yiddishbookcenter.org

ISBN 978-1-7343872-2-3

Made possible with the generous support of Anita and Steven Feinstein

Pakn Treger

Translation Issue 2020

Introduction

By Madeleine Cohen

To America

By Aaron Glanz Leyeles, translated by Oliver Elkus

Immigration

By Isaac Bashevis Singer, edited by David Stromberg

The First Patient

By Fradel Shtok, translated by Jordan Finkin and Allison Schachter

The First Trip to Coney Island

By Sam Liptzin, translated by Zeke Levine

What Are We Teaching Our Children?

By Joseph Opatoshu, translated by Shulamith Berger

If I Were in Alabama

By Yoysef Kerler, translated by Maia Evrona

Letters

By Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, translated by Miranda Cooper

The Immigrant Jewish Intellectual

By Abraham Goldberg, translated by Daniel Kennedy

New Bosses

By Avrom Reyzen, translated by Curt Leviant

Hometown to Treyf Ground

By Chone Gottesfeld, translated by Sophia Shoulson

My Father and

Our Mothers Will Not Be at Our Deaths

By Israel Emiot, translated by Leah Zazulyer

Dream

By Moyshe Efron, translated by Ollie Elkus

You Should Have Been There

By Miriam Karpilove, translated by Jessica Kirzane

Vrastata Trasmata!

By Jonah Rosenfeld, translated by Rachel Mines

America and I

By Aaron Glanz Leyeles, translated by Zackary Sholem Berger

Introduction

I love the braggart skyline of Manhattan,

the rivers of this land, the thousand-year prairies;

I love the automobiles, the streets, splendid as parquets,

I love the dream of the reality, that is called America.

So begins Aaron Glanz Leyeles’s 1963 poem To America, translated by Oliver Elkus—the opening poem of this year’s Digital Translation Issue of Pakn Treger. As with any ode, the poem dutifully and joyfully begins with a list of the virtues of the beloved addressee. As the poem continues it illustrates not only the dream of America but, more important, how that dream is tempered by reality.

Somehow it isn’t surprising that so much of Yiddish literature written about the experience of immigrating to America focuses more on the challenges and the sense of loss that are part and parcel of the immigrant experience than on the triumphs and the new possibilities. While there are some extremely funny and touching moments in these newly translated works of Yiddish literature, there are very few rosy portrayals of "di goldene medine," the golden country of America. Instead, many of these works offer at best a silhouette of the American Dream, set in stark relief against the reality of the experience of immigration.

The themes that emerge from bringing together the works in this issue are by and large not unique to the Jewish immigration experience. While nearly 3 million European Jews came to America between 1880 and 1924, there were also more than 1.5 million Irish immigrants in the same period and 4 million Italian immigrants, to give just two examples. Nor are the insights of these works unique to that period of American immigration. As Isaac Bashevis Singer writes in the essay included here, I realize now that these kinds of confused thoughts were characteristic only for me and not for other immigrants, but I still feel that, in general, it may reflect all immigrants—a sudden loss of values, a confusion and irritation which takes years to heal, and sometimes even generations. Bashevis wrote these thoughts roughly half a century after his immigration in 1935. By that point, having won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was certainly what you would call an immigration success story—the picture of the American Dream. Yet what is universal in his experience, he believes, is the experience of loss, confusion, and irritation.

Bashevis’s essay is one of several pieces included here that reflect on key moments of arriving in America. Bashevis and Jonah Rosenfeld both recount an immigrant’s very first day in New York: Bashevis being driven around by his brother I. J. Singer, Rosenfeld’s narrator being brought to live with a stranger. Chone Gottesfeld describes the journey from Europe and his arrival on Ellis Island, and Sam Liptzin writes a bittersweetly humorous story about a new immigrant’s first trip to Coney Island. Other pieces consider the loss that Bashevis describes, reflecting on what the immigrant must leave behind when coming to America, usually in the form of lost loves, family, and changed relationships. The excerpt from Miriam Karpilove’s novel Judith is told in the form of letters written by a young woman on her way to America to her fiancé who has stayed behind in Europe, as she realizes that some distances may in fact be too great for love to span. Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn’s story is also about a lost long-distance love: during her sea voyage to Rio de Janeiro a young woman rereads letters from the man who has led her on for years. Israel Emiot’s and Moyshe Efron’s works take up heartbreaking stories of families divided by immigration, death, and shifting values.

Another theme explored by several of these works is the changing nature of work and Jewish identity in America and how these are often bound together: Avrom Reyzen’s story New Bosses tells of a rabbi negotiating the expectations of his new American congregation, and the excerpt from Joseph Opatoshu’s novel Hibru relays a debate among Jewish educators choosing between Yiddish, Hebrew, or English as the language of instruction for their young American students. Abraham Goldberg’s essay compares the trials of the Jewish intellectual in America to those of Robinson Crusoe, a comparison, writes translator Daniel Kennedy, that does not go well for the intellectual. And continuing in this more humorous mode, Fradel Shtok’s story The First Patient depicts a scene that will be familiar to many first-generation Americans as proud immigrant parents helicopter lovingly over their dentist son’s first appointment with a patient.

Finally, a poem written in the Soviet Union by Yoysef Kerler takes inspiration from the civil rights movement in America, imagining solidarity between Jews and African Americans. Kerler’s dream about the struggle for equality in the United States and what it could mean for him in the Soviet Union returns us to Aaron Glanz Leyeles’s dream of the reality and another translation from his collection America and I, this time translated by Zackary Sholem Berger. We were struck to receive these two poems translated with strikingly different approaches, though both offer moving and skillful English versions of powerful Yiddish poems. These two poems will likely feel very different to readers; the first is an ode to America as exuberant as the nation itself. The final (though from the same collection!) is a reflection upon fifty years in the new land, much like Bashevis’s essay. The differing sentiments toward the experience of coming to America that Leyeles offers are an example of the sophistication and capacity of Yiddish poetry, and the differing styles of these two English translations exemplify the great craft and skill of the Yiddish translators featured in this issue.

American and Jew. I’ve brought them (in myself) together.

How? Don’t expect some narrative thread

Brightly tying ring to ring, methodically styled.

A human life—at least mine, I know for sure—

Isn’t a structure, founded, erected per strict plan.

It’s quite sinuous. It’s a misty forest trail, rather,

Without a clear start. There’s definitely an end

which we don’t live to see. Not from directions in brochures.

You walk in transparent or blindfold cloth, you’re

Surrounded by whispers, wailing, laughter. Fated—or less than.

Madeleine Cohen

Director of Translation and Collections Initiatives

To America

by Aaron Glanz Leyeles

translated by oliver elkus

Aaron Glanz Leyeles (b. Warsaw March 5, 1889; d. New York December 30, 1966) is one of two names most closely associated with the introspectivist movement of Yiddish modernist poetry, the other being Jacob Glatstein, fellow co-founder of In zikh, the introspectivist journal. Writers such as Jacob Pat and Ephraim Oyerbakh credited Leyeles with a knowledge of poetic forms largely foreign to the Yiddish poetic tradition, such as free verse, which eventually found expression in Yiddish due to his influence. Perhaps just as significant as his creative contributions to Yiddish literature were his ideological and pedagogical contributions to the Yiddish world. Convinced that territorialism was the sole answer to the Jewish problem, in 1911, just two years after his immigration to America, he spoke to the governor of Alaska regarding the possibility of opening a center for Jewish immigration, and in 1912 he traveled to a conference in Vienna as a delegate of the American Socialist Territorialists. As an educator he helped to establish the Workman’s Circle schools among other Yiddish schools in Toronto, Winnipeg, Rochester, and Sioux City. Leo Finkelshteyn wrote of Leyeles that All his life he has been a passionate fighter . . . on the whole a progressive humanist, ethnic secularist, Yiddishist, and above all—a socialist, implying that, at least by Finkelshteyn’s account, to Leyeles, Yiddishism and socialism were not only natural compatriots but were so ideologically inseparable as to be completely blurred in the scheme of his imagination. Accordingly, the following poem, Tsu amerike (from Amerike un ikh, 1963), serves as an expression of Leyeles’s humanistic zeal as much as it does his Yiddishistic eloquence. —Oliver Elkus

To America

I love the braggart skyline of Manhattan,

the rivers of this land, the thousand-year prairies;

I love the automobiles, the streets, splendid as parquets,

I love the dream of the reality that is called America.

I love the youthful vigor and the autonomous breath,

the hopeful tenor, the profusion of languages,

the mixing of peoples, races, colors, tribes—

from the sun land of the south to the snowy mountaintops of the north.

I have found here bread to eat and clothes to wear,

I have received here humanity’s greatest gift:

the level look, the right to want,

and I love you land, with tenderness, with longing.

After degradation and after fear, after yellow patches and after