Debbie Nathan

Ten years ago I started studying Yiddish. I began at a five-week summer program in Oxford, England (click here for my account of that experience).

Later, Alan Astro, at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, was kind enough to further my studies in exchange for one home cooked meal a week, followed by a pint of Hagen-Daz. Alan told me to study grammar on my own; at our sessions, we would do literature. We would read aloud, he said, and he would explain any word or grammar structure I didn’t understand. That was it. He opened a book of stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. “I can’t do this!!” I kvetched. “I’m just a beginner!” “Do it,” he commanded. I did. Much sooner than I’d expected, I was feeling the tam of reading Bashevis in the original.

Alan was really into the writer Wolf Wieviorka, so the first piece he gave me after Bashevis was Wieviorka’s short story, “Er iz eyferzikhtik af Herzlen” – “He’s Jealous of Herzl.” I loved it, first, because it reminded me that lots of Jews used to fight about whether or not Zionism was a good thing. And second, its callow-youth, sturm-and-drang, leftie eros reminded me of me and my friends doing commie politics in the 1960s and 70s.

Wieviorka was a Polish Jew who immigrated to Paris in the 1920s when he, himself, was only in his twenties. He opened a cheap, student restaurant on the Left Bank that during the interwar years became a hangout for young, immigrant Jewish Communists, Zionists, Bundists, artists, and literati. They were the Yiddish-speaking versions of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Beautiful Jewish bohemians, and I’d never heard of them till I read Wieviorka. The characters he crafted were much like people of my generation, except we’ve since been detained by commodification, while they were doomed by fascists.

Wieviorka wrote two books of short stories. One, Mizre un Mayrev (East and West) was published in Paris in 1936. Bodnloze Mentshn (Placeless People) came out a year later.

After the Nazis invaded France in mid-1940, Wieviorka fled to southern France on foot, moving from the Toulouse area to Nice, then trying to make it to America – without success. In late 1943 he was deported to Germany and sent to Auschwitz. He perished in Birkenau. His wife and most of his children were also murdered in the camps.

Wieviorka’s surviving son, Meni, is a Yiddish speaker living in Paris. I wrote him while I was working on these stories to ask if I could publish them. He told me my letter inspired him to get his dad’s work translated and published in his home country. Today, you can read a lot of Wolf Wieviorka’s work in French, and a bit in English.

Interested in learning Yiddish yourself, and finding your own as yet untranslated literature to bequeath to the non-Yiddish-speaking world? Click here to visit the New York-based Uriel Weinreich program of the YIVO — the premier program for serious students of Yiddish. Or here for Yugntruf, a group that promotes use of Yiddish and which offers classes and many other activities in the New York area.

To read my translations of Wieworka, click on their titles, top and right. I still have some stories to post, so visit later.