Jeffrey Shandler is a scholar of modern Jewish culture and holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish studies from Columbia University. He has been a Dorot Teaching Fellow in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, as well as a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School of Communication and the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In the 2000-2001 academic year he will be the Smart Family Fellow at the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers University. Shandler has written and lectured widely on such topics as Jewish memory culture, modern Yiddish literature and culture, American responses to the Holocaust, and the role that the media plays in modern Jewish life. His book, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (1999), is the first full-length study of the presentation of the Holocaust on television from the late 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. Shandler has worked as a curator of exhibitions and media programs at the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting at the Jewish Museum in New York, the YIVO Institute and the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. In 1998 he was the co-curator of "Holy Land: American Encounters With the Land of Israel in the Century Before Statehood" at the National Museum of American Jewish History. Currently he is working on a study of Yiddish culture after World War II. e-mail shandler@rci.rutgers.edu
The Smithsonian Institute's 1976 exhibition entitled "Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation, 1776-1914," featured portraits of twenty-nine noteworthy sojourners from European and Asian lands to the United States, ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens to Giacomo Puccini and H. G. Wells. One of these visitors, the only Jew of the group, was Yiddish writer Sholem Rabinowitz, known to his public as Sholem Aleichem.1 Unlike most of the other travelers, Sholem Aleichem eventually became a resident of the United States, settling among the hundreds of thousands of East European Jewish immigrants in New York City, and writing both for and about the American Yiddish-speaking community.
Yet even though Sholem Aleichem died here-his funeral on 15 May 1916 serving as a national pageant that the American Jewish community has perhaps never equaled to this day-it is still somehow right to identify him as a visitor, rather than an emigrant, to America. It is true that he achieved unrivaled success on both sides of the Atlantic as a Yiddish writer on the subject of East European Jewish life, and moreover, that he was instrumental in forging both a popular audience and a modern aesthetic for secular Yiddish literature in Europe. However, as his failed career as an author for New York's Yiddish theater and his mixed success in the American Yiddish press evince, Sholem Aleichem never quite found his place as a writer for the distinctive culture of America's East European immigrant Jews. Though hailed in both the Old World and the New as the champion of Yiddish as a literary language, he never felt "at home" in the developing American Yiddish literary idiom. Moreover, the Yiddish language, which was fundamental to the author's great artistic and popular success, has since proved to be a major barrier between Sholem Aleichem's legacy and the succeeding generations of American Jews, who are less and less literate in Yiddish.
Sholem Aleichem was himself somewhat aware of this looming obstacle. Toward the end of his life the author was eager to see his work overcome it through translation, and in his will he acknowledged the likelihood that his own descendants would eventually read his work in some other language. The challenge of translating Sholem Aleichem's writings has, in fact, not only been taken up by one of his sons-in-law and a granddaughter, but by dozens of men and women throughout this century. Moreover, scholars and enthusiasts of Yiddish literature and culture have concerned themselves with the matter of translating Sholem Aleichem above all other Yiddish writers, some even making of it a test case for the translatability of Yiddish belles lettres in general. Others have broadened the significance of the issue, regarding the translator's task not only :is carrying across the author's oeuvre from one language to another but also as conveying the world of East European Jewry that Sholem Aleichem is seen as embodying to readers of another time, place, and experience.
Nowhere has the effort to translate Sholem Aleichem been greater than in America. This seems appropriate, as the United States is now home to most of the descendants of the author's original readership; on the other hand America is also, ironically, the place where Sholem Aleichem, the Jews' vox populi, seems to have lost his voice. American translators of Sholem Aleichem have, in effect, been trying to bridge the gulf between the Old World and New that the author himself was unable to span successfully. The distance between the Jewish culture of America's East European immigrants and the Yiddish speakers of the czars' empire that Sholem Aleichem faced was not only measured in the thousands of miles between the United States and Russia but also by the considerable disparity between these two Jewish cultures (this notwithstanding the fact that America's Yiddish-speaking immigrant culture was barely a generation old). Sholem Aleichem's American translators have not only confronted the same challenges, but have measured this formidable distance along the ever-increasing dimension of time as well. The author's death, the end of America's great age of European emigration, the two World Wars, the destruction of the largely Yiddish-speaking East European Jewish community, the emergence of the United States as home to the world's largest and most enduring diaspora Jewish culture, the decline of Yiddish as the Jews' international lingua franca-all these are factors that the translators of Sholem Aleichem have had to negotiate as they have endeavored to bring his work-and his "world"-across to their American readership.
Though one might suspect that growing obstacles would increasingly discourage forays into bridging this gap, the opposite appears to be true. Interest in Sholem Aleichem among non-Yiddish-speaking American Jews has grown considerably in the seven decades since his death, during which time he has emerged as a culture hero, his persona and his artistic achievements fused into an icon of East European Jewish folk language, culture, and spirit. Moreover, English-language translations of the author's work are not merely evidence of the development of the author's iconic presence in the American Jewish consciousness; they embody the icon itself. Throughout the century Sholem Aleichem-his icon and his oeuvre-has loomed larger and larger as American Jewry's primary means of approaching the traditional culture of East European Jewry. Thus each translator's effort may be regarded not simply as a literary work but also as a cultural artifact. Furthermore, the corpus of Sholem Aleichem in English translation provides a resource in which the dynamic of modern American Jewry's understanding of its Old World heritage can be traced.
Sholem Aleichem's commitment to creating a modern, nationalist literature in the native tongue of the millions of Yiddish speaking Jews who lived throughout Europe and the Americas by no means precluded an interest in seeing his work translated into other languages. In addition to an ongoing effort to see his Yiddish works rendered in Hebrew (at the hand of his son-in-law Y D. Berkowitz),2 he took particular interest in the first authorized effort to translate his writings into a non Jewish language-a collection of stories done in Russian by Y A. Pinus in 1910 under the title Deti Cherty (Children of the Pale).3 Sholem Aleichem attempted to have English renderings of his works published while making his first visit to America, and during his lifetime he authorized two translations of his work into English-Stempenyu, his novel of 1888, and an anthology of short stories called Jewish Children.4 Both were translated by Hannah Berman and published, respectively, in London in 1913 and in New York in 1920.
Since them, translations have increasingly become the vehicle through which Sholem Aleichem reaches new generations of Jewish readers (and translation has been, of course, the form in which the non-Yiddish-literate audience has encountered him all along). Over the course of this century Sholem Aleichem has become the most widely translated of Yiddish writers, perhaps only recently rivaled by the popularity of Isaac Bashevis Singer. The first attempt to catalogue translations of Sholem Aleichem into English was prepared by Uriel Weinreich in 1954.5 Weinreich cites thirty-five different publications of Sholem Aleichem in English, the efforts of some thirty different translators. The list has grown considerably in the last three decades; the 1987-88 Jewish Book Annual contains the most up-to-date bibliography of Sholem Aleichem in English, compiled by Louis Fridhandler, listing over 230 translations of individual stories, essays, and novels.6
Yet for all this, Sholem Aleichem has borne a reputation for being "the most untranslatable of writers," as Jacob Shatsky, for example, writes in the Sholom Aleichem Panorama of 1948.7 Moreover, Sholem Aleichem's work is seen as the quintessential test case for the issue of the translatability of Yiddish literature as a whole. In her article of 1956, Rhoda Kachuk states that demonstrating the effective translatability of Sholem Aleichem into English "has its effect not only on the reputation of Sholom Aleichem himself, but also on the whole area of translations from the Yiddish.."8 This is not seen as a case of the untranslatability of a modern master, whose intricate use of his language's many levels of signification defies complete transfer into another language-a case of translating Joyce or Proust, or, to use Yiddish examples, Bergelson or Sutzkever. Rather, it is the folkstimlekh (folksy) quality of Sholem Aleichem's writing that is perceived as being what makes the task impossible. More than the work of any other Yiddish author, Sholem Aleichem's writings are strongly identified as being the quintessence of Jewish linguistic folk art. Thus, Curt Leviant remarks, in his introduction to Stories and Satires, a collection of translations published in 1959:
Words for him [Sholem Aleichem] were not the medium of separation between author and reader. They were not used to make the reader aware that he is experiencing literature. Words, rather, for Sholom Aleichem, were the magnet that united reader and writer; it made them aware that they were experiencing life. He knew well the distinction between the language of literature and the language of the people. And his was the language of the people elevated to literature. That is why so many of his expressions and metaphors have become a living part of the Yiddish language.9
There is no doubt that the works of Sholem Aleichem present considerable, sometimes formidable challenges to his translators. The subject is often commented on in their prefaces and has previously been the subject of scholarly discussion.10 As in any translation effort, various solutions to the problems of rendering Sholem Aleichem in English are possible, and throughout this extensive corpus we find that different translators tend to opt for particular solutions within the available range of approaches. Analysis of the changing trends in response to the challenge of translating Sholem Aleichem, in turn, offers insight into the changing image American Jews have held of the author, as well as of his work and the Yiddish culture he has come to embody.
One such category of solution that translators of Sholem Aleichem employ is that of word-for-word calquing of the Yiddish idiom into English. Generally regarded as a less than satisfactory remedy, it nevertheless haunts the work of all translators to some extent. In the corpus of Sholem Aleichem in English, such overly literal rendering of Yiddish into English is more prominent in the earlier translations, including those by Hannah Berman mentioned above, as well as the stories that appear in Helena Frank's anthology Yiddish Tales of 1912,11 and stories that appeared in the journal East and West during 1915-16. Here, Yiddish syntax is frequently imitated too faithfully (for example, in the short story "Passover in a Village," the phrase "Sholem-aleykhem, vos makht epes a yid in gezunt?" is rendered by Berman as "Peace be unto you. How is a Jew in health?")12 and individual words are often calqued beyond the point of comprehension-thus amorets is rendered "man of the earth" rather than "ignoramus" and farshvartst appears as "blackened" instead of "exhausted."13 In addition to improperly rendering the idiomatic meaning of individual Yiddish words or expressions, these translations fail to carry across the overall folkstimlekh style of Sholem Aleichem-garrulous, familiar, witty, carefully crafted to evoke the rhythms and quirks of spoken Yiddish.
The second kind of translation solution one encounters is that of omission and revision. Here the translator also serves as the author's self-appointed editor. A prominent example of this may be found in the two volumes of stories prepared by Julius and Frances Butwin-The Old Country of 1946 and Tevye's Daughters of 1949.14 These were the first major translations of Sholem Aleichem to appear after World War II, and they remain enormously popular to this day, having recently been reissued in one volume under the title Favorite Tales of Sholom Aleichem.15 In her introduction to The Old Country, Frances Butwin explains their editorial rationale:
Sometimes we had to use translators' license with the exact wording .... [particularly in] stories which depend a great deal on mood and atmosphere .... In a few stories we left out passages that seemed to us irrelevant or outdated . . . [or] where a whole digression occurs that has no bearing on the story.16
In addition to taking liberties with individual stories, the Butwins-and other translators as well-disregard the structural unity that Sholem Aleichem intended for his serial works. Thus, individual chapters of Motl Peysi dem khasns, Menakhem-Mendl, and Tevye der milkhiker appear in a number of anthologies as isolated stories. In the Butwins' Tevye's Daughters, seven of the ten chapters of the Tevye series are included, interspersed with other, unrelated stories by the author. Frances Butwin explains in the volume's preface: "Because we wished to preserve [Tevye's rambling and informal style of narrative] and also to indicate the lapse of time between the stories, or chapters, we scattered them through the book instead of presenting them in a solid block."17
Perhaps the most drastic of revisionist approaches to rendering Sholem Aleichem in English-one that extends far beyond mere translation-is the work of Maurice Samuel. His volume The World of Sholom Aleichem, first issued in 1943,18 presents biographic material on the writer, historical and cultural background on East European Jewry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with retellings of parts of Sholem Aleichem's writings, all fused into a highly synthetic, refunctioned work that defies easy classification. In his bibliography of research sources for Sholem Aleichem, Uriel Weinreich lists the work under the heading "Criticism" but notes that
Rather than supplying a background for Sholom Aleichem's works from external sources, this book draws most of its evidence from within Sholem Aleichem's works. It thus provides no perspective for the evaluation of Sholom Aleichem as a creative person or for his works as portraits of anything but ' themselves. 19
A third kind of translation approach involves the diligent search for idiomatic English-language analogues for the original Yiddish text, despite the challenges of Sholem Aleichem's highly idiosyncratic, culturally specific Yiddish. The translations of Tamara Kahana, notably her Adventures of Mottel the Cantor's Son of 195320 and The Great Fair of 195521 are the earliest major efforts that proclaim an agenda of striving for a consistent, analogous English-language idiom that matches the spirit of the original text. Kahana, a granddaughter of the author, was also the daughter of his Hebrew translator, Berkowitz. She acknowledges that both Berkowitz's commitment to the literary value of Sholem Aleichem's writings and his ideas on how to translate them informed her approach, stating in her preface to Mottel, "I have . . . had my father's guidance in the difficult art of translation, whereby an attempt is made to transcribe the essence of a man's work from one idiom to another."22 Here Kahana also explains the rationale behind her approach to the translation:
The story of Mottel is the story of a normal little boy, and I thought that my primary task was to make him human and real to the English reader, even though his background was strange and alien. I have therefore ruthlessly sacrificed strange rhythms and exotic expressions (and, after all, many Yiddish expressions have their idiomatic equivalent in the English tongue) for the preservation of a picture of a normal child in abnormal circumstances. 23
Noteworthy examples of this "analogue" approach may be found in more recent translations as well, such as Joachim Neugroschel's rendering of Stempenyu in his Shtetl anthology of 1979. Here the argot of the klezmorim (Jewish musicians) is rendered in the jive of American black jazz musicians. For example, the following translation:
Di kapore zolstu vern, Yerakhmiel!-zogt Stempenyu
gants oyfgelegt. -Azoy gikh bist du gevor gevorn? E, zi
is dokh take gor a klive yaldovke! Ze nor, ze, vi zi
matret mit DI zikres!24
"You're too much, baby!" said Stempeniu cheerily. "
You checked it out that fast? Man, she is
really dynamite! A righteous chick! Dig those eyes!"25
Finally, there is the solution of not attempting to translate-that is, of retaining the original language of individual words or phrases in the body of the translation. In many of the English translations of Sholem Aleichem, certain Yiddish words or phrases are given in transcription, either with or without some kind of glossary. Although there are numerous such examples to be found throughout the canon, the items appearing in glossaries to Sholem Aleichem stories in English translation can be categorized thus:
1. Words connected to Jewish ritual or scholarship: shoykhet, tales, sude, gemore, shul, etc. (the largest category).
2. Food words: farfl, tsimes, homentashn, grivn, tsholnt, etc.
3. Regional (not specifically Jewish) terminology: dacha, kopek, starosta, troyka, verst, kazatsky, etc.
4. Yiddish terms or expressions deemed untranslatable by virtue of their distinctive ethnic character: luftmentsh, shlemil, shlimazl, gvald, lekhaym, mazltov, shnorer, goyisher kop, etc.
Passages that appear in the Yiddish original in a Slavic language or in loshn-koydesh (liturgical Hebrew and JudeoAramaic) are given in transliteration in some English versions as well, as in Hillel Halkin's translation of the Tevye series (see n. 47 below) or Leonard, Wolf's translation of The Haunted Tailor:
Ish hoyo be-Zolodievka, there was a man in Zolodievka, a village near Mazapevke, not far from Haplapovitch and Kozodoievka, between Yampoli and Stritsh, just on the way from Pistchi-Yavadeh to Petschi-Khvost to Tetreve and from there to Yehupetz. U'shmo Shimon-Eliyohu, and his name was Shimon-Eli, but he was called "Shimon Eli Shma Koleynu " because when he said his prayers in the synagogue he had a way of working himself up, putting a trill into his prayers and singing them at the top of his voice.26
Reb Chairil-Chono the Wise, in all his dignity, using his switch, helped drive the goat from his house. The gang of students urged her on: "Hai Kozeh! Pashol Koze, move it."27
As these two excerpts illustrate, transcription itself poses a series of problems, such as how to render the Cyrillic and Jewish alphabets in Latin letters, whether to gloss the untranslated material, in a glossary, a footnote, explicitly or implicitly in the English text, or not at all.
An examination of different translations of the same text reveals some of the dynamic in approaches to translating Sholem Aleichem over time. For example, here is an excerpt from the short story Dos meserl (written in 1886), followed by four translations:
"Vos iz dos far a feder, velkhe shvartse yor? Vos iz dos far arumtrogn zikh mit federn?" fregt mikh der tate,
a kranker yid mit a gel oysgetriknt ponem, un tsehust zikh. "Na dir gor federn, shpilkhlekh-khe-he-he-he!"28
"What's that feather for? What do you want with feathers?" asked my father, a sickly man, with a yellow,
dried up face, and he began coughing. Here is something new-feathers, toys!" ("The Knife," translation by Rene Sylva)29
What sort of a feather is that? What the devil does it mean? Why do you carry a feather about with you?" asked my father-a sickly Jew, with a yellow, wrinkled face. He had a fit of coughing. "Here are feathers for you-playtoys! Tkeh-heh-heh-heh!" ("The PocketKnife," translation by Hannah Berman)30
"What's that thing for? What the devil are you carrying a feather around for?" my father wanted to know.
He was a sickly man with a yellow emaciated face and a perpetual cough. What kind of toy was a feather?
He couldn't understand it. A boy my age playing with a feather! ("The Pocketknife," translation by Frances Butwin)31
"What sort of feather is this, the devil take it? What sort of business is this running around with feathers?" asked my father, a sickly man with a yellow, wizened face. "There's a fine how-do-you-do! Feathers! What nonsense!" And he fell into a fit of coughing. ("The Penknife," translation by Curt Leviant)32
The earlier translations tend to be more "literal" than the later ones, sometimes to the degree that the former miss the meaning of certain Yiddish idioms. For example, "Vos iz dos far a feder?" does not mean the same thing as "What's that feather for," as Rene Sylva renders it in East and West. Rather, Leviant's "What sort of feather is this" has the same sense as the original (the English word "for," a sometime cognate of Yiddish far, proves a false friend here). Also, Hannah Berman translates yid as "Jew," whereas the others use the less literal, but-in this context-more appropriate, "man." On the other hand, note that the later translations tend to take more liberties with the text: Butwin changes some of the dialogue to narrative and inserts an explanation by the protagonist of the father's remarks ("He couldn't understand it. A boy my age playing with a feather!"); Leviant moves the reference by the narrator to the father's cough to the end of the paragraph, taking the place of the onomatopoeic coughing fit of the Yiddish original, which he omits altogether.
It would be overly simple, if not misleading, to organize the entire corpus of Sholem Aleichem in English translation into a periodized, "evolutionary" schema. Nevertheless, as others have observed, there have been changes in the trends of rendering Sholem Aleichem's writings into English over the course of the past seven decades,33 which in turn reflect a dynamic conceptualization of Sholem Aleichem and his work as well as Yiddish language and East European Jewish culture in general.
There are comparatively few translations of Sholem Aleichem before World War II, and they tend to be of poor quality. One sometimes wonders how well these translators knew Yiddish-or even English, for that matter-and if they worked from the Yiddish original or from a mediating translation, perhaps in German or Russian. There are outright mistakes in conveying meaning, and their overly literary calquing sometimes produces a text that is almost as far from idiomatic English as it is from Yiddish. The fact that there was still at that time a substantial number of people in America reading Sholem Aleichem in the original (witness the frequency with which his works were printed during the interbellum years) suggests that Sholem Aleichem's writing had yet to find an extensive audience among non-Yiddish readers in America, Jewish or gentile. Thus the considerable cultural distance between Americanized Jews and the recent Yiddish-speaking immigrants of the period is, perhaps unintentionally, manifest in an editorial from the inaugural (April 1915) issue of the short-lived serial publication East and West, which was devoted to bringing contemporary Yiddish literature in English translation to the American Jewish community:
The conviction has been growing that the number of people who seek acquaintanceship with the sources of Yiddish spiritual life is considerably large. The Americanized Jew, who rejected his old biases [against the Yiddish-speaking immigrant], and turned a willing eye and ear to the true Jewish activities, heard of a Jewish literature, of a number of great Jewish talents, of a few Jewish geniuses, and he began to wonder. He also got to know of a Yiddish drama that lays claim to real literary and artistic value; of Jewish poets, humorists, publicists, art critics; and he grew even more curious. Then he heard it hotly maintained that these Yiddish writers and artists deserve a high place in international literature, and he began to ask that it be shown to him .34
Likewise, the Americanized Jew's perception of Yiddish culture as remote and alien is clearly manifest in Helena Frank's introduction to the anthology Yiddish Tales:
The tales given here . . . have each its special note, its special echo from that strangely fascinating world so often quoted, so little understood (we say it against ourselves), the Russian Ghetto-a world in the passing, but whose more precious elements, shining, for all who care to see them, through every page of these unpretending tales, and mixed with less and less of what has made their misfortune, will surely live on . . .35
The same sense of Sholem Aleichem's work as providing the gentile reader with access to the alien world of the East
European Jew appears in the preface to Knopf's 1929 reissue of Jewish Children, written by American novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher:
. . . Like many Americans (probably the majority) I had more notions, blurred and inaccurate though they might be, about life in Thibet [!] than about life among Jews. When I say "Jews" I mean those who have not diluted the ancient traditions of their race and religion; not the East Side, partly Americanized Jews, nor the sophisticated, intensively cultivated cosmopolitans, who are the only two varieties most Americans ever meet in books, or elsewhere.
When therefore, I walked in among the orthodox Russian Jews in this book, my ignorance of them (like that of most of my countrymen) was complete. It is always a quite sufficiently interesting experience to come in contact with a new people, even if they be some savage tribe, with -no literature, no knowledge of their own history, no racial self-consciousness. But the people into whose hearts Sholom Aleichem bade me look were not only new to me, but richly dowered with an unbroken tradition complex and ancient beyond belief for an upstart Anglo-Saxon, with subconscious accumulations of racial experience dating from far before the very beginnings of any civilization with which I was familiar.36
Thus, Yiddish literature is offered by such translations to the English reader as something primitive and exotic; the awkwardness of their overly literary renditions suggests that Yiddish and English are, in essence, incompatible languages, and their respective cultures therefore mutually exclusive. The translators who endorse the tactic of revision or omission imply a need to "improve" Sholem Aleichem's works for the English reader. Yiddish language and literature are here seen as somehow "less" than their English counterparts. The folkstimlekh quality ascribed to these stories suggests that they are literature "in the raw"; Sholem Aleichem
is a naive artist, if, indeed, there is any art to his work at all. Maurice Samuel writes:
It is hard to think of him [Sholem Aleichem] as a "writer." He was the common people in utterance. He was in a way the "anonymous" of Jewish selfexpression .... He did not set out with the conscious and self-conscious purpose of "putting it down for posterity." He wrote because of a simple communicative impulse, as men chat in a tavern or in a waiting crowd with their like.37
In their introduction to The Best of Sholom Aleichem, editors Howe and Wisse discuss at length the notion of Sholem Aleichem as a "folk writer." Yet even in their attempts to demystify this myth, they at times employ language that assumes Sholem Aleichem's achievement was essentially veristic. Thus Howe writes that the author's ability to imitate the "voices and mannerisms of ordinary Jews . . . [is] as if Sholom Aleichem had anticipated the tape recorder!"38 Such attitudes not only risk overlooking the great and careful artistry with which Sholem Aleichem shaped his works, skillfully manipulating foikstimlekh elements; they also promote a vision of East European Jewish culture as archetypally primitive-undifferentiated and simplistic, sheltered from the forces of civilization that are at the same time tacitly regarded as both more advanced and more corrupt.
Translators who advocate employing the "analogue" solution-that of creating an English text that is the full equivalent of the Yiddish original-implicitly elevate Yiddish from being "less than" to being "equal to" English and its literature. With this higher esteem granted to Yiddish there comes, however, a naivete about the limits of the cultural specificity of Sholem Aleichem's "world" and of yidishkeyt in general. Neugroschel's "jive" translation of Stempenyu, cited above, is an interesting test of these limits. The comparison of East European klezmorim to American black jazz musicians is, to some extent, useful for English-language readers of the 1970s who might be unfamiliar with the mores of traditional East European Jewish culture. Both groups of musicians have been regarded as marginal figures in their respective cultures, beyond the pale of social respectability, while at the same time unofficially attractive (especially sexually) as exotics, freer and more adventuresome than their bourgeois patrons. The linguistic aspects of the analogue, however, are more problematic. Whereas the slang of klezmorim was an argot not known to the average middle-class reader of the Yidishe folksbibliotek of 1888, as the author's glosses suggest (see n. 24), the jive terms employed by Neugroschel are familiar to the contemporary American reader and require no internal translation. Moreover, in their familiarity the latter carry associations with American urban black, "beat," and hippie cultures-as-well as with the world of jazz musicians-local colors that clash with the palette of the small town, turn-of-the-century, East European Jewish world of Sholem Aleichem's novel.
But translations that advocate the "analogue" approache -specially the earliest ones, appearing soon after the Second World War-figure as an important part of a larger attempt by American Jews to deal with the sudden devastation of East European Jewish culture, and specifically, with the elimination of the center of Yiddish culture and the death of a majority of its speakers. In the post-World War II era much of Yiddish literature, including the work of Sholem Aleichem, has been reconfigured by a new generation as a means of achieving continuity with a cultural "past" from which it had been recently and abruptly cut off. Thus, Samuel describes his book as
a sort of pilgrimage among the cities and inhabitants of a world which only yesterday-as history goes -harboured
the grandfathers and grandmothers of some millions of American citizens. As a pilgrimage it is an act
of piety; on the other hand, it is an exercise in necromancy . . . for that world is no more.39
Moreover, the "universality" of Yiddish-as evidenced by the ability to translate it into English-"affirms" that Yiddish culture is not irretrievably lost, but can transcend the Holocaust. As Leviant writes in 1959:
To his generation, to those who spoke Yiddish and lived in its world, Sholom Aleichem mirrored what was known. For the succeeding generations, for those who neither speak nor read Yiddish, but have a faint memory of it and long to know its culture, Sholom Aleichem opens a door to a world unknown and, with laughter and tender pathos, shows us the spirit of our forebears and their heartbeat, which has been the key of our survival .40
The employment of the last of these solutions to translation problems-that of not translating, but transcribing acknowledges the extent to which the culture of turn-of-the century East European Jewry is, in fact, a distinct, nonuniversal culture and is no longer accessible to us due to the obstacles of time, dislocation, and historical experience. The extensive reliance on this solution is more often a hallmark of the work of scholars of Yiddish literature than nostalgic enthusiasts, and such efforts usually feature glossaries, footnotes, and prefatory remarks on the historical, linguistic, and cultural background of the stories. The texts cannot, as they did in Sholem Aleichem's day, stand "on their own." A note in the lengthy introduction to the Howe and Wisse anthology explains:
The difficulties of translating Sholom Aleichem are almost beyond recounting. They go far deeper than the problem of rendering Yiddish idiom into English, a problem sometimes solved by finding enough English equivalents, and more often acknowledged as beyond solution because the Yiddish idiom is so deeply planted in Jewish tradition it is virtually untranslatable. The jokes [in the language play of the text], then, are not only on one or another character, but also on us, readers who have lost or abandoned the tradition .41
The Sholem Aleichem corpus available in English has grown extensively over the last seven decades. The selection of which works get translated proves to be as revealing a measure of changing perceptions of East European Yiddish language, literature, and culture as how these translations are done. Until the mid-1970s, the selection of works for translation into English, from among the hundreds of individual stories, monologues, plays, sketches, essays, and novels that comprise Sholem Aleichem's oeuvre, could largely be described in one word: Kasrilevke. Those stories about the poor but plucky Jews who inhabit a mythical Ukrainian shtetl were the most popular and "beloved" of Sholem Aleichem's work for his Yiddish readers. These stories have likewise, until recently, comprised the bulk of the author's work available in English. For the reader of this canon Sholem Aleichem is a writer about Jews in Eastern Europe, not in Central Europe or America, about shtetl Jews instead of urban Jews, and about poor Jews rather than middle- or upper-class ones.
Another factor that has shaped the canon of Sholem Aleichem in English is that stories about children (which are sometimes mistakenly described by translators or publishers as being for children) have been favored for translating. This trend dates back to the earliest authorized translations by Pinus and Berman, for which the author himself suggested stories with children as protagonists: Although there is no known record explaining Sholem Aleichem's recommendation, Shatzky has speculated that these stories are particularly appropriate for translation because in them "psychological insight and subtly exquisite artistry predominate, rather than [Sholem Aleichem's] uncommon linguistic felicity, a quality difficult to transfer to another language."4z Currently the same stories have enjoyed renewed popularity in English renditions, as evinced by a number of recent editions of Sholem Aleichem in translation that are manifestly intended for a child reader. They are distinguished most prominently by the presence of illustrations, which are sometimes quite lavish .43
Many of the translations that have appeared in the last two decades, in addition to providing a more scholarly approach to the texts, have also endeavored to bring the English reader a fuller picture of Sholem Aleichem's extensive and varied corpus. Thus, a special effort is made in Howe and Wisse's anthology to show the "darker side" of the "humorist" Sholem Aleichem, with the inclusion, for example, of an excerpt from Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, his series of monologues about the devastating impact of World War I on East European Jewry. Sholem Aleichem's interest in Zionism is brought to the attention of the English reader in 1984 with the publication by Beth Shalom-Aleichem in Tel Aviv of Why Do the Jews Need a Land of Their Own?,44 a collection of the author's essays and fiction having a Zionist theme. Aliza Shevrin's translations of Marienbad (1982), In the Storm (1984), and The Nightingale (1985)45 give us Sholem Aleichem the novelist (the only previous English translations of any of his novels being Hannah Berman's Stempenyu of 1913 and Frances Butwin's abridged Wandering Star of 1952).46 In addition to presenting Sholem Aleichem's work in a less familiar genre, these books deal with subjects and themes beyond the well-known world of Kasrilevke-the first work, an epistolary novel about wealthy Jews at a Central European resort town, the second, a Zionist romance, and the third, a family novel that explores the conflict between traditional and secular Jewish life in Russia at the time of the revolution of 1905.
A change in the handling of the serial works also reveals a reevaluation of Sholem Aleichem's writing. In contrast to the Butwins' presentation of the Tevye monologues described above, Hillel Halkin has recently offered the complete Tevye the Dairyman series (albeit with some scholarly editing), along with the entire collection of Railroad Stories, in the recently released first volume of the Library of Yiddish Classics edited by Ruth R. Wisse.47 Here the presentation of both Tevye and the Railroad Stories is academic, following the format of the Folksfond edition of Sholem Aleichem's work-which is generally used by contemporary scholars as the standard edition-and including a critical explanation of Halkin's redaction of the Tevye series. By contrast, the Butwins' presentation of this series in Tevye's Daughters is evocative of, and perhaps even modeled on, the experience of those of Sholem Aleichem's original audience who would have read these episodes individually as they first appeared in various newspapers or journals over a period of years.
Translating Sholem Aleichem's work in America also involves the recasting of the author's writings into other media. This includes the American Yiddish theater's adaptations of some of the author's nondramatic works, a Yiddish-language film made in America based on the Tevye stories,48 and English-language adaptations of the author's dramatic and nondramatic works for performance on stage, screen, and radio.
All of these reworkings involve "translating" the aesthetic power of the written Yiddish word-the impact of which is today a fraction of what it was in America at the beginning of this century-into the actor's histrionic art, the illustrator's and stage designer's visual idiom, or the composer's musical vocabulary-all "languages" in which today's American Jews are much more "literate." As is the case with the mission of some of Sholem Aleichem's English translators, these works are regarded as a kind of litmus test for the translatability and therefore the implied universal accessibility-of Yiddish culture. Consequently, when reconfiguring Sholem Aleichem as a commodity for non-Yiddish-speaking American Jews (and their non-Jewish neighbors as well) these various artists confront the limitations of the cultural distinctiveness of the author's works.
The best-known translation of Sholem Aleichem's work into an American art form is surely Fiddler on the Roof, the Broadway musical of 1964 written by lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock, with book by Joseph Stein. Worried at first that their show would be "too ethnic" to succeed on Broadway, they later boasted of its success on stages across Europe, in Israel, South America, Australia, and even Japan, as well as in its cinematic form (released in 1971).49 Not only did the creators of Fiddler effectively adapt a piece of musical theater performed in English from a Yiddish prose work, but they transformed Sholem Aleichem's Tevye monologues into a drama that reflects American Jewish sensibilities of the early 1960s, its hero becoming an archetypal Old World ancestor, whose "folk" wisdom more often suggests American Jewish liberalism.50 In Fiddler Sholem Aleichem's "world" serves as an exotic setting for a musical about love, generational conflict, and the waning of tradition. The show's very title is testimony to the central role that nonliterary elements play in this particular "translation" process, and demonstrates how Sholem Aleichem serves as an icon invoking traditional East European Jewish culture. The image of "a fiddler on the roof'-which appears nowhere in the Tevye series (or in Sholem Aleichem's corpus)-was instead inspired by an early twentieth-century painting by Marc Chagall. The image not only gives the show its title but serves as a central metaphor- articulated by Tevye in the prologue, enacted in the staging and choreography (the "Fiddler" is a nonspeaking role), and echoed in the music.
Despite the claims of some that translating Sholem Aleichem is a proving ground for the translatability of Yiddish literature in general, much of what has been said above about rendering his oeuvre in another language cannot be extrapolated to other Yiddish writers. English translations of Sholem Aleichem differ significantly from those of Sholom Asch and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the two other Yiddish prose writers who are substantially represented in English. In the latter two cases their stories and novels have been, as a rule, translated under the author's direct supervision; hence, each work has received something of a "definitive" English rendering. Neither author's oeuvre has been heavily edited or reconfigured by translators; nor have these men and women written introductions explaining the agenda of their efforts. There appears to be no question that what they are translating is no more and no less than belles lettres. But this has not been the case with translating Sholem Aleichem into English. Here, as we have seen, prefatory discussions of the rigors of the translation process appear frequently (and, to be fair, the challenge of rendering Sholem Aleichem into English is more daunting than taking on either Asch or Bashevis). Moreover, such-explanations almost inevitably expand into an evaluation or appreciation of the language, the culture, the "world" of Sholem Aleichem. Thus the motivation to retranslate a work by Sholem Aleichem should not be seen as simply wanting to offer something more stylistically felicitous than the efforts of one's predecessors, but as a sign of a desire, if not an imperative, to reassess the significance of the Sholem Aleichem icon as embodied in his writings.
The status that Sholem Aleichem holds in the consciousness of the American Jewish community as a symbol for the essence of Old World Jewry has its origins in late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe.51 Subsequently, the figure of Sholem Aleichem acquired a distinctive iconic status among turn-of-the-century immigrants, as the embodiment of literary and cultural values of a world that they had left behind, one that they regarded with a complex and sometimes contradictory array of feelings.
Thus Sholem Aleichem's sojourns in the United States provided the immigrant community with an Old World patrician hero to parade before their American neighbors on the one hand, as well as giving them a touchstone for assessing their independence from the parent East European culture on the other. This double, contradictory function of Sholem Aleichem as an icon for the American Jewish community is perhaps most succinctly encapsulated in his being hailed as the "Jewish Mark Twain." Though the author has been celebrated elsewhere as the Jewish Gogol, Chekhov, Chaucer, Balzac, or Dickens, the comparison of Sholem Aleichem to Mark Twain has proved most enduring in America. According to Forverts editor Ab. Cahan, this appelative was originally coined merely as a means of explaining, by analogy, to English-language journalists who were covering the writer's first arrival in the United States in 1906, that Sholem Aleichem was a popular Yiddish humorist.52 But the analogy has had even more meaning for American Jews, serving them as a "translation" of Sholem Aleichem's iconic stature as a cultural hero.
Moreover, burying the embodiment of Old World culture on American soil consolidated the Yiddish-speaking immigrant community's intimate bond with the Sholem Aleichem icon. In future years, these immigrants would turn to the author-whose will they had read in the daily papers and whose funeral they had personally attended, as metaphor for geyn of keyver-oves (visiting the graves of one's parents)-as a patriarch; thus, reading and revering Sholem Aleichem was an enacted metaphor for visiting the inaccessible burial sites of their own ancestors. The children of the immigrant generations in turn inherited this legacy of the Sholem Aleichem icon-though they were reading his works in English versions, as often as not. Subsequently, when faced with the transformation of Jewish Eastern Europe into a forbidding graveyard after World War II, they turned to Sholem Aleichem as an authoritative yet grandfatherly resource for information on a heritage from which they were otherwise estranged along the dimensions of time, space, and historical experience. Thus, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of selected stories by Sholem Aleichem (published in 1956, it is largely a reissue of the Butwins' collection The Old Country), Alfred Kazin writes:
This is the great thing about the Jews in this book. They enjoy being Jews, they enjoy the idea of belonging
to the people who are called Jews-and "their" Sholom Aleichem, perhaps more than any other
Jewish writer who has ever lived, writes about Jewishness as if it were a gift, a marvel, an unending theme of
wonder and delight .... The secret of this enjoyment consists not so much in physical solidarity and "togetherness,"
as in the absence of loneliness, as in the fact that a deep part of your life is lived below the usual level of strain,
of the struggle for values, of the pressing and harrowing need-so often felt in America-to define your values
all over again in each situation, where you may have even to insist on values themselves in the teeth of brutish materialism.54
In twentieth-century America the phenomenon of Sholem Aleichem has been translated into an icon signifying the very essence of Old World Jewish life. The devotion of the immigrant generations of Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish readership has given way to a range of responses in America-from the exoticist curiosity of outsiders to the nostalgic sentiments of cultural enthusiasts and the critical admiration of literary scholars; from those who hail Sholem Aleichem as an author with universal appeal to those who praise-or dismiss-his work as inescapably bound to the uniqueness of turn-of-the-century East European Yiddish culture. That way of life has continued to grow more distant from the American Jewish community, at the same time accruing a rich amalgam of values of cultural, spiritual, and intellectual "authenticity." As the works of East European Jewry's vox populi are turned to, with increasing frequency and for a greater variety of reasons, as the essential touchstone of Old World yidishkeyt, Sholem Aleichem will continue to become all the more powerful a symbol in the mythology of American Jewry.
NOTES
The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance and support he has received in the preparation of this essay from Adrienne Cooper, Janet Hadda, Deborah Dash Moore, and Stuart Schear, and from his colleagues in the Sholem Aleichem in America colloquium, convened at the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies/YIVO in the fall of 1986, especially Ellen Kellman and Nina Warnke.
1. The various English renderings of the name "Sholem Aleichem" (Shalom/Sholem/Sholom [-] Aleichem/Aleykhem) are retained as they appear in titles, citations, and bibliographic references to the author. Throughout the body of the essay, however, the spelling "Sholem Aleichem" is maintained. Transcriptions of Yiddish are likewise preserved as they appear in citations. In the body of the essay the YIVO transcription system is employed.
2. Berkowitzs Hebrew renderings of the Menakhem-Mendl and Tevye series, his first published translations of Sholem Aleichem's works, appeared in the journals Hed Ha-Zman and Ha-Olam in Vilna in 1910.
3. Deti Cherty was published in Moscow by Knigo-Izdatel'stvo "Sovremennyia Problemy" ("Contemporary Problems" Book Publishers) in 1910. According to Jacob Shatzky, the earliest known translation of a work by Sholem Aleichem is Philip Mansch's rendering of Stempenyu in German, published in 1889. See Shatzky's "The Untranslatable Translated;" in Sholom Aleichem Panorama, ed. Melech Grafstein (London, Ontario: The Jewish Observer, 1948), 57-59, for an overview of the first generation of translations of Sholem Aleichem's works into a number of European languages.
4. Stempenyu was published by Methuen in London, 1913; Jewish Children first appeared in New York in 1920, issued by Knopf The latter draws its contents from several of Sholem Aleichem's collections of stories, including Lekoved yontej, Mayses jar yidishe kinder, and Oreme un freylekhe. Correspondence between Sholem Aleichem and Bernard Cassel of New York City (now in the possession of his grandson Andrew Cassel) provides evidence that as early as December 1906 the author was making attempts to have his works translated into English and published. These efforts were, apparently, unsuccessful.
5. Uriel Weinreich, "Guide to English Translations of Sholom Aleichem," in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Yiddish Language, Folklore and Literature, ed. Uriel Weinreich (New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, Columbia University, 1954), 285-91.
6. Louis Fridhandler, "Index to the English Translations of. Sholom Aleichem" in Jewish Book Annual 1987-88 (New York: JWB Jewish Book Council, 1987), 121-42. Other noteworthy listings of Sholem Aleichem's works in English translation include bibliographies of Yiddish literature in English translation prepared by Dina Abramowicz for the YIVO Institute in 1967 and 1976 and David Neal Miller's selective Sholem Aleichem bibliography (see n. 33 below).
7. Shatzky, "The Untranslatable Translated," 57.
8. Rhoda Kachuk, "Sholom Aleichem's Humor in English Translation;" YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 11 (1956/7):40.
9. Sholom Aleichem, Stories and Satires, trans. Curt Leviant (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959), 11.
10. In addition to Shatzky and Kachuk, see Teodor Gutmans, "SholemAleykhem in di royvargshprakhn," in For Max Weinreicb on His Seventieth Birthday: Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature, and Society (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), 477-99.
11. Yiddish Tales, trans. Helena Frank (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1912). The collection also includes stories by Peretz, Spector, Shapiro, Reisen, Pinsky, and others.
12. Shalom Aleichem, Jewish Children ("authorized version by Hannah Berman") (New York: Knopf, 1920), 12.
13. See Shatzky, "The Untranslatable Translated;" 59.
14. Sholom Aleichem, The Old Country, trans. Julius and Frances Butwin (New York: Crown, 1946); Tevye's Daughters, trans. Frances Butwin (New York: Crown, 1949).
15. Sholom Aleichem, Favorite Tales of Sbolom Aleicbem, trans. Julius and Frances Butwin (New York: Avenel, Outlet Books, 1983).
16. Sholom Aleichem, The Old Country, viii.
17. Sholom Aleichem, Tevye's Daughters, x.
18. Maurice Samuel, The World of Sholom Aleicbem (New York: Knopf, 1943).
19. Uriel Weinreich, "Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916): Principal Research Sources," in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Yiddish Language, Folklore and Literature, ed. Uriel Weinreich (New York: Linguistic Circle of New York; Columbia University, 1954), 284.
20. Sholom Aleichem, Adventures of Mottel the Cantor's Son, trans. Tamara Kahana (New York: Henry Schuman, 1953).
21. Sholom Aleichem, The Great Fair: Scenes from My Childhood, trans. Tamara Kahana (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1955).
22. Sholom Aleichem, Adventures of Mottel the Cantor's Son, second page of foreword (unnumbered).
23. Ibid.
24. Sholem Aleykhem, Stempenyu, in Ale verk fun Sbolem-Aleykhem (New York: Sholem-Akeykhem folksfond oysgabe, 1919), vol. 11 (Yidisbe romanen), 136. Note that in the original Yiddish version of Stempenyu (published in Di yidisbe folks-bibliotek, Odessa, 1888), Sholem Aleichem included a glossary of the musicians' slang, as these terms were unfamiliar to the general Yiddish reader of his day. Thus klive = sheyne (pretty); matret = kukt (looks); zikbres = oygn (eyes). These glosses also appear in the Folksfond edition.
25. Sholom Aleichem, "Stempeniu: A Jewish Romance;" in The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewisb Life in Eastern Europe, trans. and ed. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Richard Marek, 1979), 293.
26. Sholom Aleichem, The Best of Sbolom Aleicbem, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (New York: New Republic Books, 1979), 2.
27. Ibid., 14.
28. Sholem Aleichem, "Dos meserl," in Ale verk fun Sholem-Aleykhem (New York: Sholem-Aleykhem folksfond oysgabe, 1920), vol. 8 (Mayses far yidisbe kinder, ersbter bukh), 7-8.
29. East and West, vol. 1, no. 2 (New York, 1915): 47.
30. Jewish Children (New York: Knopf, 1920), 193.
31. Sholom Aleichem Panorama (London, Ont.: The Jewish Observer, 1948), 99.
32. Some Laughter, Some Tears (New York: Paragon Books, 1968), 113.
33. See, e.g., David Neal Miller, "Sholem Aleichem in English: The Most Accessible Translations," Yiddish, vol. 2, no. 4 (1977):61-70.
34. East and West, vol. 1, no. 1 (New York, 1915):2.
35. Yiddish Tales, 6.
36. Sholom Aleichem, Jewish Children, trans. Hannah Berman (New York: Knopf, 1929), v.
37. Samuel, The World of Sholom Aleicbem, 6.
38. Sholom Aleichem, The Best of Sholom Aleicbem, xix.
39. Samuel, The World of Sholom Aleichem, 3.
40. Sholom Aleichem, Stories and Satires, 13-14.
41. Sholom Aleichem, The Best of Sholom Aleicbem, xxi-xxii (note).
42. Shatzky, "The Untranslatable Translated;" 57.
43. The refunctioning of Sholem Aleichem's stories about children as stories for children is of considerable significance for an understanding of the changing image of Yiddish literature and culture in the American Jewish community and warrants more extended scholarly scrutiny, as does the phenomenon of the illustrated Sholem Aleichem. American Yiddish editions of Sholem Aleichem's works are rarely illustrated, except for some children's editions (e.g., Dos meserl, with illustrations by Nota Koslowsky, first issued in pamphlet form for classroom use in 1937 by the Workmen's Circle and reprinted several times since), and illustrated Yiddish-language editions for the general reader are rare in Europe before the Second World War. In contrast, postwar editions in both the United States (in English) and the Soviet Union (in Russian and Yiddish) often feature illustrations. Inside Kasrilevke, for example, a collection of stories translated by Isidore Goldstick and originally published by Schocken Books in 1948, was reissued by this house in 1965, advertising on the book's cover that the new edition features "'Thirty Drawings" by American Jewish artist Ben Shahn. The function of illustrations as commentary on the text-or as a kind of translation-requires further discussion.
44. Sholom Aleichem, Why Do the Jews Need a Land of Their Own? trans. Joseph Leftwich and Mordecai S., Chertoff (New York: Herzl Press/ Cranbury, NJ.: Cornwall Books, 1984).
45. Sholom Aleichem, Marienbad, trans. Aliza Shevrin (New York: Putnam, 1982); In the Storm, trans. Aliza Shevrin (New York: Putnam, 1984); The Nightengale, or the Sage of Yosele Solovey the Cantor, trans. Aliza Shevrin (New York: Putnam, 1985).
46. Sholom Aleichem, Wandering Star, trans. Frances Butwin (New York: Crown, 1952).
47. Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, translated and with an introduction by Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1987).
48. Tevye der milkhiker Maymon Films, 1939; screenplay and direction by Maurice Schwartz, who also performed the title role. A silent version of the Khave episode was also made in the United States in 1919; it is now believed to be lost. -
49. See Richard Altman with Mervyn Kaufman, The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof (New York: Crown, 1971).
50. See Seth L. Wolitz, "The Americanization of Tevye or Boarding the Jewish Mayflower," American Quarterly 40 (1988):514-36.
51. See Dan Miron, Sholem Aleykhem: Person, Persona, Presence (New York: YIVO, 1972).
52. See Ab. Cahan, "lz der farglaykh a rikhtiker?" Forverts, 19 May 1916, p. 4.
53. Sholom Aleichem, Selected Stories of Sholom Aleicbem (New York: Random House, 1956), vii-ix.
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Jeffrey Shandler | | 
Sholem Aleichem(1859-1916) | |
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