Yiddish is a dying language. But it wasn’t always so. In the early part of the 20th century, during its heyday, Yiddish theatre and literature thrived in North America and Eastern Europe. It originated within the Rhineland and spread amongst Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. The written language uses Hebrew characters, though it is a mixture of German, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and several other languages. Once a thriving spoken language, Yiddish began dying off with Jewish emigration to North America.
In an effort to preserve the language, it is being taught to a new generation.
Arguing With the Storm, edited by Rhea Tregebov, a professor of poetry and translation at the University of British Columbia, contains 14 stories by nine authors, all originally written in Yiddish and translated into English. The editor offers the anthology as one more contribution in the renaissance of Yiddish literature, a movement which began in 1980. Perhaps a reflection of living through hard times, each of the stories is filled with life.
Here are a few highlights:
Bryna Bercovitch was born in 1894 in a slum in the Ukraine. She went to university in Moscow in 1915, was a political activist, then immigrated to Montreal. Her story, “Becoming Revolutionary,” takes a peak back into a time when people haggled over scraps of meat in the market, baked their own bread and lived life through simple pleasures. “A Natural Death,” by Paula Frankel- Zaltzman, set in the Russian Dvinsk ghetto during the Nazi occupation, tells the story of a devoted daughter who keeps her father comfortable until he does the unheard of for a Jew during the Holocaust—he dies a natural death.
“Rumiya and the Shofar,” by Rikuda Potash, challenges the inherent sexism in the religion, which disallows women from taking part in rituals such as blowing the Shofar (ram’s horn) at Rosh Hashanah (Jewish new year).
An important document of Yiddish literature, the stories in Arguing With the Stormbring us back to another time and place, with passion, eloquence and grace.
