Home
One of the impacts of the Holocaust is that it hastened the devolution of the Yiddish language. Approximately, 85 percent of the Jews who died in the Holocaust could speak Yiddish.
The monolingual stance of the Zionist movement further generated the modern dominance of Hebrew over Yiddish as the most common tongue of Israel. There are perhaps less than 2 million speakers of Yiddish speakers left, whereas there were approximately 11-to-13 million Yiddish speakers prior to World War II.
The rich history of Yiddish literature is therefore in jeopardy, soon to be overlooked and ultimately forgotten, unless retrieval and revival actions are taken.
This has led to the creation of the loosely-knit Vancouver School of Yiddish translators that includes Rachel Mines, Seymour Levitan, Helen Mintz and Faith Jones.
As a translator of Yiddish, Rachel Mines has concentrated on disseminating into English the stories of Jonah Rosenfeld, a major literary figure and frequent contributor to the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts in the United States from the 1920s to the mid-1930s. Mines' translation from the Yiddish of nineteen stories by Rosenfeld, The Rivals and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press, 2020), showcases Rosenfeld's dark, Chekhovian style that foregrounds loneliness, social anxiety and people's frustrated longing for meaningful relationships.
Born in Chartorisk, in Ukraine, in 1882, Joseph Rosenfeld had a traditional Jewish education until age 13 when his parents died of cholera. His brothers sent him to Odessa where he was obliged to apprentice as a lathe worker and worked in that trade for ten years. In 1904, at age 23, he published his first short story on his artisan life. Thereafter he devoted himself to writing, immigrating to New York in 1921 as a self-described "Yiddish Maxim Gorky." One of his plays, The Rivals, was a hit at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York in 1922. He became a long-time editorial staff member of the Jewish Daily Forward. After a seven-year battle with stomach cancer, he died at the age of 64 in 1944.
"Today, Rosenfeld is almost entirely unknown," says Mines, "since he wrote only in Yiddish." Only a handful of his short stories, and none of his plays or longer works, were previously translated into English. According to Mines, pessimism about family life is typical of Rosenfeld. "Family members show little tenderness or love for another," she says. "His poverty-stricken childhood and his unhappy youth as an orphan inspired his literary focus on the more negative aspects of human psychology."
She notes that most of his stories share common themes of family dysfunction, alienation, loss of tradition, disappointment and death. In one of his highly absorbing tales, "The Four," the mother has no compunction about offering her ten-year-old daughter to her lodger, Rabinovich, in exchange for the small gifts he brings the family and the rent he pays.
It's not giving away too much to say that several stories, such as 'The Lodger,' culminate in tragedy, including suicide. The final paragraph of 'What Happened to the Old Man' is typical. "When the old man's daughter came into the shed early that morning, she found him lifeless on the ground. Lying next to him was a dead goose."
In 'Reb Dovid,' when a hard-working young woman, invisibilized by her father and brothers, disappointed in love, feels drawn to a bridge she imagines herself as a character in a story. "She jumped into the river without a moment’s hesitation… Resolutely, she sank to the bottom."
Disconsolate, having foolishly yearned two years for the love of woman beyond his station, who never knew his feelings, the protagonist in 'A Fleeting Romance' has only one comfort -- no one ever knew.
In 'Mazel Tov,' we are left with the image of a young wife "who lay for hours, weeping silently, hysterically, into her pillow." The story is a rare, early depiction of abortion in literature in the U.S.
"I guess you could also say I was attracted to Rosenfeld's stories," says Mines, "because his insights into the darker corners of human psychology appeal to some of my own ways of thinking as a child of survivors. I am interested in why people think and act the way they do, even when those thoughts and actions are harmful."
Both of Mines’ parents were Holocaust survivors who spoke Yiddish at home.
Rachel Mines has been involved in Holocaust education and outreach in Skuodas, Lithuania, where her father was born and raised. Between 30% and 50% of the town's population were Jewish prior to the Nazi occupation in June of 1941. Most of Skuodas's Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The once thriving Jewish community has one cemetery memorial and three Holocaust memorials dedicated to the murdered Jews of Shkud (the town's Yiddish name).
While an instructor at Langara College, Rachel Mines also created, coordinated and taught the "Writing Lives: The Holocaust Survivor Memoir Project." This was a second-year, two-semester course that teamed Langara students with local Holocaust survivors to help them create written memoirs of their wartime experiences. The program has since been extended to First Nations survivors of residential schools.
One of the Writing Lives participants, Serge Haber, a Holocaust survivor, told the Jewish Independent, "It is very crucial to me, because, for the last 35 years, I have been thinking of writing my experience in this life. I never had a chance, the time or the person to listen to me. I hated the machines that record, so [a] personal touch was very important to me. And here it was, presented by Langara. I worked with two students, and I think we created a relationship, a personal understanding of what I went through.
"It is important to know that the Holocaust happened not only in camps but also in many cities around Europe, where thousands upon thousands of Jewish people, young and old alike, perished for nothing, only because they were Jewish. I profoundly remember three words that [I was told] while I was watching what was happening on the streets below, where thousands of people had been killed -- my father mentioned to me, 'Look, listen and remember.' And I remember."
Born and raised in Vancouver, Rachel Mines received her Ph.D. in English from King's College, University of London in 2000 as a specialist in Old English language and poetry but has since realized "the world is not crying out for specialists in Old English poetic meter." She was a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow in 2016.
Her fellow Yiddish translator Helen Mintz has revived Abraham Karpinovitch's stories memorializing the pre-war Jewish community of Vilnius, Lithuania, for Vilna, My Vilna (Syracuse University Press 2016). Faith Jones has translated The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (New World Translation Series, Tebot Bach 2014)
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 contributed articles to the revised Encyclopedia Judaica.
BOOKS:
A Toilet Paper or A Treatise on Four Fundamental Words Referring to Gaseous and Solid Wastes Together with their Point of Origin (Anvil 1991, 2001).
Translation from the Yiddish. The Rivals and Other Stories (Syracuse Univ. Press 2020) $24.95 9780815611202. Original stories in the Yiddish by Jonah Rosenfeld.
BOOKS:
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
PHOTOS
Rachel Mines' mother appears here on a porch in Montreal as Jennie Lifschitz in 1946, two years before any other Jews were allowed into Canada in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Below: Rachel Mines (right) with her second cousin Rita (left) and Rita's mother Bella (centre).
The monolingual stance of the Zionist movement further generated the modern dominance of Hebrew over Yiddish as the most common tongue of Israel. There are perhaps less than 2 million speakers of Yiddish speakers left, whereas there were approximately 11-to-13 million Yiddish speakers prior to World War II.
The rich history of Yiddish literature is therefore in jeopardy, soon to be overlooked and ultimately forgotten, unless retrieval and revival actions are taken.
This has led to the creation of the loosely-knit Vancouver School of Yiddish translators that includes Rachel Mines, Seymour Levitan, Helen Mintz and Faith Jones.
As a translator of Yiddish, Rachel Mines has concentrated on disseminating into English the stories of Jonah Rosenfeld, a major literary figure and frequent contributor to the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts in the United States from the 1920s to the mid-1930s. Mines' translation from the Yiddish of nineteen stories by Rosenfeld, The Rivals and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press, 2020), showcases Rosenfeld's dark, Chekhovian style that foregrounds loneliness, social anxiety and people's frustrated longing for meaningful relationships.
Born in Chartorisk, in Ukraine, in 1882, Joseph Rosenfeld had a traditional Jewish education until age 13 when his parents died of cholera. His brothers sent him to Odessa where he was obliged to apprentice as a lathe worker and worked in that trade for ten years. In 1904, at age 23, he published his first short story on his artisan life. Thereafter he devoted himself to writing, immigrating to New York in 1921 as a self-described "Yiddish Maxim Gorky." One of his plays, The Rivals, was a hit at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York in 1922. He became a long-time editorial staff member of the Jewish Daily Forward. After a seven-year battle with stomach cancer, he died at the age of 64 in 1944.
"Today, Rosenfeld is almost entirely unknown," says Mines, "since he wrote only in Yiddish." Only a handful of his short stories, and none of his plays or longer works, were previously translated into English. According to Mines, pessimism about family life is typical of Rosenfeld. "Family members show little tenderness or love for another," she says. "His poverty-stricken childhood and his unhappy youth as an orphan inspired his literary focus on the more negative aspects of human psychology."
She notes that most of his stories share common themes of family dysfunction, alienation, loss of tradition, disappointment and death. In one of his highly absorbing tales, "The Four," the mother has no compunction about offering her ten-year-old daughter to her lodger, Rabinovich, in exchange for the small gifts he brings the family and the rent he pays.
It's not giving away too much to say that several stories, such as 'The Lodger,' culminate in tragedy, including suicide. The final paragraph of 'What Happened to the Old Man' is typical. "When the old man's daughter came into the shed early that morning, she found him lifeless on the ground. Lying next to him was a dead goose."
In 'Reb Dovid,' when a hard-working young woman, invisibilized by her father and brothers, disappointed in love, feels drawn to a bridge she imagines herself as a character in a story. "She jumped into the river without a moment’s hesitation… Resolutely, she sank to the bottom."
Disconsolate, having foolishly yearned two years for the love of woman beyond his station, who never knew his feelings, the protagonist in 'A Fleeting Romance' has only one comfort -- no one ever knew.
In 'Mazel Tov,' we are left with the image of a young wife "who lay for hours, weeping silently, hysterically, into her pillow." The story is a rare, early depiction of abortion in literature in the U.S.
"I guess you could also say I was attracted to Rosenfeld's stories," says Mines, "because his insights into the darker corners of human psychology appeal to some of my own ways of thinking as a child of survivors. I am interested in why people think and act the way they do, even when those thoughts and actions are harmful."
Both of Mines’ parents were Holocaust survivors who spoke Yiddish at home.
Rachel Mines has been involved in Holocaust education and outreach in Skuodas, Lithuania, where her father was born and raised. Between 30% and 50% of the town's population were Jewish prior to the Nazi occupation in June of 1941. Most of Skuodas's Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The once thriving Jewish community has one cemetery memorial and three Holocaust memorials dedicated to the murdered Jews of Shkud (the town's Yiddish name).
While an instructor at Langara College, Rachel Mines also created, coordinated and taught the "Writing Lives: The Holocaust Survivor Memoir Project." This was a second-year, two-semester course that teamed Langara students with local Holocaust survivors to help them create written memoirs of their wartime experiences. The program has since been extended to First Nations survivors of residential schools.
One of the Writing Lives participants, Serge Haber, a Holocaust survivor, told the Jewish Independent, "It is very crucial to me, because, for the last 35 years, I have been thinking of writing my experience in this life. I never had a chance, the time or the person to listen to me. I hated the machines that record, so [a] personal touch was very important to me. And here it was, presented by Langara. I worked with two students, and I think we created a relationship, a personal understanding of what I went through.
"It is important to know that the Holocaust happened not only in camps but also in many cities around Europe, where thousands upon thousands of Jewish people, young and old alike, perished for nothing, only because they were Jewish. I profoundly remember three words that [I was told] while I was watching what was happening on the streets below, where thousands of people had been killed -- my father mentioned to me, 'Look, listen and remember.' And I remember."
Born and raised in Vancouver, Rachel Mines received her Ph.D. in English from King's College, University of London in 2000 as a specialist in Old English language and poetry but has since realized "the world is not crying out for specialists in Old English poetic meter." She was a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow in 2016.
Her fellow Yiddish translator Helen Mintz has revived Abraham Karpinovitch's stories memorializing the pre-war Jewish community of Vilnius, Lithuania, for Vilna, My Vilna (Syracuse University Press 2016). Faith Jones has translated The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (New World Translation Series, Tebot Bach 2014)
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 contributed articles to the revised Encyclopedia Judaica.
BOOKS:
A Toilet Paper or A Treatise on Four Fundamental Words Referring to Gaseous and Solid Wastes Together with their Point of Origin (Anvil 1991, 2001).
Translation from the Yiddish. The Rivals and Other Stories (Syracuse Univ. Press 2020) $24.95 9780815611202. Original stories in the Yiddish by Jonah Rosenfeld.
BOOKS:
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
PHOTOS
Rachel Mines' mother appears here on a porch in Montreal as Jennie Lifschitz in 1946, two years before any other Jews were allowed into Canada in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Below: Rachel Mines (right) with her second cousin Rita (left) and Rita's mother Bella (centre).
