Seymour Levitan received the 1988 Robert Payne Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University for his translation of Paper Roses, a posthumous poetry collection by Rachel Korn, one of Canada's most important Yiddish writers. He has also translated Yiddish author Rokhl Auerbach's autobiographical A Soup Kitchen in the Warsaw Ghetto. Levitan was born in Philadelphia in 1936 and educated at the University of Pennsylvanian before coming to B.C. in 1965 to teach at UBC. His work is included in The Penguin Book of Yiddish Verse, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, The I. L. Peretz Reader, The Second First Art and Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars. He has edited and translated a volume of Rukhl Fishman’s poems, I Want To Fall Like This and co-edited Lucky to Live in Cedar Cottage: Memories of Lord Selkirk Elementary School and Cedar Cottage Neighbourhood, 1911-1963 (Vancouver School Board, 1986) with Carol Miller. He has also contributed articles to the revised Encyclopedia Judaica.

[BCBW 2007] "Local History" "Poetry" "Jewish" Alan Twigg / Holocaust Lit