The course requires the words “in translation” in order to accommodate the many languages adopted by Jewish writers after 1880—Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, German… But as I look to the content and not simply the language of these stories I am reminded that the Latin verb that stands behind “translation”—translatum, past participle of transferre—always implies a journey and a crossing of rivers, borders, and oceans, to transport oneself or to carry baggage from one domain to another. Language and literature is an important part of that baggage. In this course we will trace the migration of Jewish literature between 1880 and 1940 from the shtetl and the ghetto of Eastern Europe to its re-emergence in various languages from Tel Aviv to Western Europe and New York. Our readings include the Yiddish of Sholom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and I. B. Singer, the Hebrew of Dvora Baron, the Russian of Isaac Babel and the German of Joseph Roth 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. Lecture, discussion and short essays.

Texts:

• Dvora Baron. The First Day and Other Stories. University of California Press. [0 520 08536 8]
• Isaac Babel. The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel. W. W. Norton. [0 393 32402 8]
• Abraham Cahan. Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom. Dover Books. [0 486 22427 9]
• Henry Roth. Call It Sleep. Picador (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). [0 312 42412 4]