Although the course requires the words “in translation” in order to accommodate the many languages adopted by Jewish writers after 1880, I have expanded the list to include several works that do not require translation because they were written originally in America and in the English language. Yet even for these stories written in English I would retain the notion of “translation” which comes to us from the Latin past participle—translatum—of the verb transferre which describes a journey, a crossing of rivers, borders, and oceans, to transport oneself or to carry baggage from one domain to another. Language and literature become an important part of that baggage. In this course we will trace the migration of Jewish literature between 1880 and 1940 from the Yiddish language commonly spoken in the shtetl and the ghetto of Eastern Europe to its re-emergence in various languages from Tel Aviv to Odessa and New York. Our readings include the Yiddish of Sholom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and I. B. Singer, the Hebrew of Dvora Baron and S.Y. Agnon, the Russian of Isaac Babel, and the first phase of a Jewish-American literature written in English with a heavy inflection of Yiddish by Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth. I will also appeal to film, painting, and song throughout the period. Although the focus of the course is Jewish writers before the Holocaust, we will conclude with several stories (and films) from the post-War period that bear the imprint of the tradition that we will have just studied.

Stories by Sholom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz and I. B. Singer (Electronic Reserve)
Dvora Baron [1887-1956] (H & Y) The First Day
Isaac Babel [1894-1941] (R) Collected Stories
Abraham Cahan [1860-1951] (E) Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom
Henry Roth [1906-1995] (E), Call it Sleep
Stories by Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth (Electronic Reserve)