The Mendele
Review: Yiddish Literature and Language
(A Companion to MENDELE)
---------------------------------------------------------
Contents of Vol. 11.007 [Sequential No. 184]
Date:
1) This issue of TMR (ed). ***Shirley
Kumove wins prize. ***The Bergelson
explosion.
2) Dovid Bergelson's
"Bay nakht" translated by Leonard Prager [Yiddish text and audio:
http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/Stories.html]
3) Towards a Reading of Dovid Bergelson's
"Bay nakht" (ed.)
4) Books and Journals Received: Yeled shel stav***Afn shvel ***All
My Young Years ***Lebns-fragn
5) Takones fun yidishn
oysleyg – copies still available
6) Gilgulim ('Metamorphoses'), Paris
(2008- )
7) Ralph Ellison and Yiddish (ed.)
Click here to enter:
http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr11/tmr11007.htm
1)----------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: This issue of TMR.
*** Shirley Kumove, author
of several fine books of Yiddish proverbs and of translations from Yiddish has
been awarded the 2007 Helen and Stan Viner Canadian
Jewish Book Award for Yiddish Translation for her Drunk from the
Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin. The
award took place on
While
scrolling the story you can hear Sarah Retter reading
it. You can also examine my translation in this issue of TMR and compare it
with Neugroschel's at http:/www/ibiblio.org/Yiddish/Book/Neugroschel2/jn-fantasy-night.html.
Lastly
you can read my tentative comments on what the story is "saying."
There
appears to be a Bergelson revival. In Israel Sifriat Poalim has reissued Dov-Ber Malkin's 2-vol. Ktavim (Writings) of 1962. A review of this book in HaAretz of 27.6.02 by the poet and reviewer Dror Burshteyn starts out with
the exhilarated sentence: "Eyze sofer nifla David Bergelson" (What a wonderful writer David Bergelson is!) Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraich are the editors of now available David Bergelson (1884-1952): From Modernism to Socialist Realism
(
2)----------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: Leonard Prager
Subject: David Bergelson's "Bay nakht"
(At Night) translated into
English [see too Joachim Neugroschels' translation
at
http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/Book/Neugroschel2/jn-fantasy-night.html]
At Night
by David Bergelson [Dovid Berglson]
tr. Leonard Prager
At night, once, in a dark, close-packed and hard-snoring
coach I suddenly awoke and spotted him sitting on the bench opposite. I
recognized him right off – it was the old familiar Night Jew who could never
sleep when he rode the trains at night. And not being able to sleep he grew
restless and searched about him for something, looking into everyone's eyes,
silently summoning some deep accounting.
"Young man," he turned his sad, tearful eyes
towards me, "where are you going?" His acerbic and ancient voice
echoed in my ears, a voice older than any time I could recall. He did not talk
to me again, yet it seemed as though his voice emitted not from him but from
some distant and somehow demanding place.
"Young man, where are you going,
young man?"
And, when I opened my eyes a second time in the dark
hard-snoring coach, the train was still speeding over black bogs and desolate
soggy fields, the raintears through the night beating
on the windows and in the far corner of the coach a lamp continuously
flickering and going out. Opposite the thin door that opened to a second part
of the coach a swaddled baby did not stop wailing. And here near the wakeful
Night Jew on the bench across from me there already sat a red-cheeked young man
in a jacket and boots and I somehow felt that I also knew him from the past. He
would rise from his accustomed seat whenever he was reminded of some accident
which had befallen him and there were always people around him ready to listen
to what he had to say. They regarded him with pity and said nothing. But while
they looked at him with pity and were silent, they saw that he had a kindly
nature and said to him, "Young man," they said to him, "would
you please hop down and boil us a kettle of tea."
The young man had by now related to the Night Jew all the
troubles of his life: "And that is why I cannot sleep," he quietly
remonstrated. "And what does one do," he asked the Night Jew,"
what does one do on such a long night?" "What does one do?" The
bored Night Jew did not understand: "What do you mean, what does one
do?" He looked long into the red-cheeked youth's eyes as though searching
for some deep response. "What does one do?" he repeated quietly, his
voice again monotonous, acerbic and ancient, older than any time I could
remember. "Look into a book," he said, "study...."
"But I cannot," the youth complained.
"Cannot?"
The Night Jew thought a while. "If you cannot, then
repeat after me, word for word. Repeat: 'In the beginning the earth was empty
and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep and the spirit of God
hovered over the waters.'" "In the beginning," the youth
repeated, "the earth was empty and void, and darkness was on the face of
the deep and the spirit of God hovered over the waters."
All about them the heavily chugging train with darkened
coach was full of the snoring and harsh breathing of those who, in the light of
the flickering lamp, slept in three registers, one higher than the next. Sweaty
faces turned red, swelled, cheeks blew out, noses piped -- and all these in
three different modes. One sound was steady, decent, innocent, as though it
wanted to say, "Well, yes, I am sleeping... obviously I am asleep."
Another volley was depressed and listless: "I sleep because the world is
chaotic..." A cyclical piping, a
kind of rise and sudden fall as in the biblical "tebir"
cantillation seemed to ask, "What then is going
to happen here when everyone is asleep, then what will we have here?" And
a yet stronger sound that did not want to listen to anybody warned, "Don't
wake anyone, it will be of no use."
And in the midst of all that snoring and harsh breathing,
the red-cheeked youth repeated word for word what the restless Night Jew had
recited, how God created heaven and earth, sun and stars, day and night,
reptiles and mammals, birds, grasses and people, how the serpent was cunning
and how the wrongdoing of people had grown, and God regretted he had created
humans. God said: "I will sweep off the earth all creatures, from the
humans I created to the reptiles and birds that fly in the heights, for I
regret having created them." And suddenly... suddenly there arose out of
the ennui-suffering Night Jew a certain person called Noah. "Repeat after me,
word for word," he said to the red-cheeked youth. Repeat:" 'And Noah
found favor in the eyes of God.'"
"And Noah," repeated the youth, "found favor in the
eyes of God." All around, the hard snoring went on. The train continued
across black bogs and desolate water-drenched fields. And the night kept on
beating raintears on the windows. The only ones not
yet asleep were myself, the bored Night Jew and the
red-cheeked youth in the jacket and boots. The Night Jew and the youth sat as
though congealed, looking into each other's faces and I lay and thought:
"A good word: 'and Noah found favor'. It had saved the world."
Copyright
2007
Leonard Prager
3)----------------------------------------------
Date:
From: Leonard Prager
Subject: Towards A Reading of Dovid Bergelson's "Bay nakht"(ed.)
Variant
understandings of a work of literature can illuminate one another and make for lively discussion. Bergelson's "At Night" is singularly ambiguous
and lends itself to the most varied readings. My own view of the story is at this stage tentative,
unfixed. Let me begin by mentioning a matter which is omitted in most reprintings of the story. I suspect that the piece first
appeared in the rich January 1916 issue of
I
do not find
mystical, mythological or religious elements in this very secular allegory.
"At Night" is a symbolic fable that unravels on both a realistic and
a surrealistic level. We are aboard a real train in inclement weather in an
unspecified region at an undefined time with a diverse company of passengers
and heading we know not where. The key element in this railroad story is a
transparent metaphorical question which is repeated by a character known as
Night Jew and addressed to Young Man in Jacket and Boots: "Where are you
going?" Given that the author is David Bergelson,
the year 1916 (or earlier), it is reasonable to gloss this queston
as dealing with the direction of young assimilated Jewish youth who have left
their parents' world and not found themselves in the larger Russian one, a
generation which has severed itself from a rich Past but faces an uncertain
Future. The question of direction also applies to the teller who is the
author's persona. It is not the "story" that creates the total
impression of this somewhat strange and Kafkaesque narrative, as it is the sum
of all the verbal repetitions whose effect is hypnotic.
Ordinary life is experienced in such actions as making tea
for others and such non-actions as failing to comfort a swaddling infant who
does not stop crying. The hoary and sad Night Jew tries to redeem Young Man
with Jacket and Boots by an improvised Jewish catechetics,
rote repetition starting from the very first words of Genesis. They represent
the most fundamental text of Jewish civilization. By the story's end the pair
has reached the story of Noah and the Flood. At the tale's close, the two main
characters, Night Jew and Young Man in Jacket and Boots stare at one another in
congealed blankness.
The
teller, who may be largely the author himself, is the one who observes the contrast
between the cacophony of the snoring and the recitation of Torah passages. This
recitation is somewhat astounding since it can only be begun and hardly can go
very far; yet there is bravery here as well as hopelessness. Neither the Night
Jew nor the Red-Cheeked Youth in Jacket and Boots is idealized – both are
somehow familiar to the teller from the Past. They may have appeared in dreams
and are returning in this "halb-getrakhte mayse". Nor is the "public", whose single
attractive sign is to evince sympathy for the youth, a positive force. Their
three (I count four) modes of snoring represent the gamut of ordinary troubled
mankind.
Passages
from the biblical book of Genesis – the creation myth and the story of Noah and
the Flood -- are surely significant. The very last words of the story refer to
Noah, a righteous man who found favor in God's eyes. "Found favor" to
the teller is a powerful expression, Noah's finding favor having "saved
the world." The teller may indeed believe that Noah "saved the world"
– alluding to God's promise not to flood the world a second time. But can we
believe that Dovid Berglson
saw matters in this light?
The
rabbis had difficulties describing Noah as an exemplary figure, stressing that
he was only virtuous relative to his contemporaries. The modern reader has
numerous difficulties with the image of the virtuous hero who saved the world
from a second inundation. When God informed Noah of his plan to save him and
his family on the
4)
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: Books and Journals Received (ed.)
Yeled shel stav [A Child of
Autumn] by Sholem Ash [Shalom Asch]
stories translated into Hebrew by Leah Ayalon;
illustrations by Rita Zlubinski. Kibbutz Dahlia:
"Ma'arekhet", 2007. This is the first
translation of a body of Sholem Ash's largely unknown
short stories into Hebrew in many years. The translator received a doctorate
from the University of Haifa for her close study of Ash's Der
man fun natsres (The Nazarene). The new
collection may be purchased from Bet Shalom Ash c/o Shura
Turkov at
-- Afn shvel; gezelshhaftlekh-literarisher
zhurnal. Summer 2007, No. 337-338
The new Afn shvel under the editorship of Sheva
Tsuker has a bright and inviting appearance. A
contemporary journal in Yiddish, it should now be attractive to a wider
audience, old and young, in
-- All My Young Years; Yiddish Poetry from
An impressive bilingual (Yiddish and English) A.N. Stencl
[Avrom-Nokhem Shtentsl]
volume has now appeared, appropriately dedicated to the memory of Majer Bogdanski (1912-2005), a
sterling personality who continued the Stencl
tradition in London's East End after the
poet's death in 1983. Heather Valencia in her introduction gives us the
best portrait of Shtentsl that has appeared anywhere.
The poems selected are from Shtentsl's early – and
arguably best work – very ably translated by Haike Beruriah Wiegand and Stephen
Watts. While several major Yiddish writers were for longer or shorter periods
domiciled in
-- LebnsÎ fragn; sotsialistishe
khoydeshÎshrift far politik, gezelshaft un kultur. Nos. 655-656
[May-June 2007]
Yitskhok Luden bravely continues to edit this veteran journal, which
now has an easy-to read
internet version. In the most recent issue the editor unleashes
his disapproval of young non-native speakers who are "purists" and
proscribe many old Yiddish words as "daytshmerish".
5)--------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: League for Yiddish, Inc.
Subject: Takones fun yidishn
oysleyg – copies still available
Der EynhaytlekherYidisher
Oysleyg: Takones fun Yidishn Oysleyg. Zekster aroyskum,
in eynem mit Mordkhe Shekhters "Fun Folkshprakh tsu Kulturshprakh." [The Standardized
Yiddish Orthography. Sixth edition, together with Mordkhe Schaechter’s "Fun
Folkshprakh tsu Kulturshprakh" (The History of the Standardized
Yiddish Spelling)].
6)-------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: Gilgulim ('Metamorphoses')
A new literary
journal in Yiddish has been announced. This is a cheering event in the world of
Yiddish. The address is c/o M. Gilles Rozier , 102 Boulevard Voltaire 75011 Paris
7)-------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: Ralph Ellison and Yiddish (ed.)
In his review of Arnold Rampersad's Ralph
Ellison: a Biography in a recent New Republic Online,
Christopher Benfey writes: "One of Rampersad's
surprising revelations is that Ellison had a comfortable command of Yiddish,
having picked it up, apparently, from clients of his mother's in
------------------------------------------
End of The Mendele Review Vol. 11.007
Editor, Leonard
Prager
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