Major Effort Under Way to Retrieve and Reclaim Yiddish Literature

The Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, established here recently to make the greatest written works of the Jewish people available to readers in the English language, will sponsor ” The Library of Yiddish Classics” as its first project.

At the same time, the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., is launching a Yiddish translation project which will initially focus mainly on works of “ethnographic interest, ” primarily memoirs.

At the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, the first fruits of its translator-in-residence program, a collection of Yiddish folktales from its vast archives, will be copublished with Pantheon Books this year. The folktales, culled from its library of over 320.000 books, were translated by Leonard Wolf, its translator-in-residence, and edited by Bina Weinreich.

The Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature was launched by author Lucy Dawidowicz, who serves as its president, with Dr. Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish literature at McGill University in Montreal, as Editor-in-Chief. The Fund will raise money to enable it to commission translations of Yiddish works, and edit and prepare them for publication by Schocken Books here.

Dawidowicz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Fund envisages a series of 20 to 25 volumes which will “represent the best and the finest works of modern Yiddish literature.” Each work, which will have a “standard format” as part of the Library, will include an introduction on the author and his or her times.

‘REPRESENTATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT’ SELECTION

The first volumes in the series will be “representative and significant” selections from the works of Sholem Aleichem, Itzhak Leib Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, and Sh. Ansky. Additional works by these authors, and others, and books from earlier periods as well as reprints of previously translated works may be published later, after “the first round,” Dawidowicz said.

The Fund, at P.O.B. 46, Planetarium Station, New York, N.Y. 10024, also envisages launching a series of cassette tapes of “the spoken Yiddish word” drawn from works it will translate and publish, she said.

The National Yiddish Book Center will draw on the 350,000 Yiddish volumes it has collected from all sections of the world over the past four years for its translation project. The Center, founding director Aaron Lansky told JTA, has “thousands of volumes of memoir literature,” out of which it plans to choose 20 for translation.

“Jews were great at writing memoirs, ” Lansky said. Pointing to the fact that the memoir writers — “some completely unknown, many of them women” — of the late 19th and 20th centuries understood the importance of the “historic moment” they were living through, Lansky added that he envisioned these translated works being used as original source material in modern Jewish history courses.

Describing the effort as a “grass roots translation” project, Lansky said the Center has already been in touch with many talented translators all over the country who are eager to work with the Center, which will assist them in getting funding. The Center is located at Old East Street School, P.O.B. 969, Amherst, Mass. 01004.

YIVO, the central repository and archive of materials on the history, language and ethnography of East European Jews and their descendants in America, has long been involved in translating scholarly essays from its academic publications.

Dawidowicz, who initiated the Fund for Translation of Jewish Literature, was a postgraduate research fellow in 1938-39 at YIVO when it was still located in Vilna. After YIVO relocated to New York, in 1940, she served as assistant to the research director for six years. She is the author of “The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, ” (1947) and “The War Against the Jews” (1975). Said Dawidowicz:

“We all think this is our last chance — the eleventh hour — to retrieve and reclaim Yiddish literature. There are still people today who know the language well. Think what will happen in 30 years.”