Vilna My Vilna

by Abraham Karpinowitz

  Justin Cammy

  Programs in Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature

  Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts

  Translator’s Note

  By translating Abraham Karpinowitz’s work from Yiddish into English, I hope to bring his stories to a wide contemporary audience. Like any important writer, Karpinowitz deserves the international audience that translation into English makes possible.

  I have weighed the question of how much background to provide for the contemporary English reader. I have asked myself to what extent I should be acting as a cultural historian, bringing not only the language of the stories to non-Yiddish readers, but also their world. I have struggled with establishing where the breaking point lies in the tension between cultural explanation and interpretation on the one hand and loyalty to the original literary work on the other.

  I have decided to provide a section of notes at the end of the book to give interested readers some background to Karpinowitz’s stories and memoirs. These notes include definitions of Yiddish words that defy translation into English and that may be unfamiliar to the reader, information about historical figures who appear in the stories, and explanations about Vilna institutions and geographic landmarks. Vilna street names are retained in the Yiddish original with translation in the glossary.

  In deference to readers who would like to read the stories straight through without a nagging call to seek clarification, there are no markings on the pages drawing attention to items elaborated upon in the notes.

  The maps of interwar Vilna on pages 156–57 allow the reader to follow Karpinowitz’s characters as they move through a complex web of small courtyards, streets, and passageways and unto outlying towns and communities.

  All translations from the Yiddish that appear in the introduction and notes are by the translator, unless otherwise indicated. Justin Cammy provided his own translations for the foreword, unless otherwise indicated.

  Transliteration Guidelines

  Yiddish is written using the Hebrew alphabet. I have used YIVO (the Institute for Jewish Research) transliteration guidelines unless words are commonly known in English, at which point I have used the spelling that appears in the Miriam Webster Dictionary online (http://www.merriam-webster.com). When names of individuals have already been frequently transliterated using Roman letters, as in the cases of Jonas Turkow and Zishe Breitbart, I have maintained the most commonly used spelling. Note that the final “e” in Yiddish words like Daytshe, and in names like Tevke and Hirshke, is not silent but pronounced similarly to the final “a” in “sofa.”

  For Hebrew words, I have used the transliteration most commonly used in English language texts (based on Google searches).

  Acknowledgments

  It took a multilingual village of individuals spread across the globe to produce this book. I am deeply grateful to all of you.

  I start by thanking Sheva Zucker, who read early drafts of my translations of each of the stories in this collection, except for “Vladek,” word by word, checking for accuracy of translation, making suggestions as to appropriate English usage, and engaging in discussion about translation theory and practice. I learned important fundamentals of translation from Sheva. With the gift of her teaching, I also greatly improved my Yiddish language skills.

  Translating these stories brought me great joy. While never swerving from the truth, Abraham Karpinowitz answered genocide with love: love for his characters and love for his craft as a writer.

  Dr. Sarah Lapickaja granted me permission to bring the work of her late husband into English. Simon Lapitsky and Anna Karpinowitz Gelbart facilitated the permission granting process. Anna also shared information about her uncle, Abraham Karpinowitz, and family photographs.

  Liba Augenfed, Fania Brancovskaja, and Shulamis Zhabinskaia shared their detailed memories of life in di amolike Vilna and their knowledge of Karpinowitz’s idiomatic Lithuanian Yiddish. When all efforts to understand the author’s idiomatic usage failed, I turned to Eliezer Niborski, who always found the key to solve the translation challenge. Meir Shapiro shared his unpublished manuscript of Vilna Yiddish expressions and his extensive knowledge in this area.

  Abraham Karpinowitz’s good deeds and reputation have greatly benefited the look of this English language publication of his stories. Samuel Bak and the Pucker Gallery gave permission for the use, without charge, of Bak’s painting Soutine Street for the cover. Yosl Bergner allowed us to use, without charge, his three drawings as they appeared in the original Yiddish publication of Karpinowitz’s book Baym Vilner durkhhoyf (I. L. Peretz, 1967). Bak’s painting and Bergner’s drawings are the perfect accompaniment to Karpinowitz’s stories. Thank you also to Reina Kambayashi for her evocative photograph of Abraham Karpinowitz, also given without charge.

  Thank you to Solon Beinfeld and Harry Bochner for your wonderful and appropriately named Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary.

  I began this translation project in a class taught by Rivke Margolis at the YIVO Summer Program in New York. Katherine Silver, as part of the 2014 Yiddish Book Center translation fellowship program, helped me to find my own voice as a translator.

  Benjamin Mintz created the perfect work space for me.

  I would like to thank Dara Culhane, Michael Kaufman-Lacusta, Rachel Mines, Kian Mintz-Woo, David Mivasair, Rachel Mines, Elliot Palevsky, Ruth Portner, Nancy Richler, Leah Robinson, and Marna Sapsowitz, who read the translations of various stories and memoirs, providing valuable feedback. Thank you Meyer Grinshpan and Irvin Rivkin for your skilled and open-hearted teaching. Shimon Joffre and I shared some of our translations with each other. For the introduction: Dara Culhane encouraged me to express my own voice and Rachel Mines made valuable editorial suggestions.

  The notes at the end of this book were made possible by the hard work and bibliographic talents of the librarians and archivists at the Jewish Public Library, in particular Eddie Paul and Eiran Harris. I would also like to thank Leo Greenbaum (YIVO), Amriel Kissner (independent archivist), and Eddie Stone (Jewish Public Library) for their research help. Also Ilisia Kissner, who donned an archivist’s hat for a day.

  Michael More synthesized information from many sources to create the map, repeatedly working under great time pressures. Laimonas Briedis shared his extensive knowledge of Vilna, particularly its urban geography.

  Kian Mintz-Woo, Rachel Mines, and Faith Jones helped me to troubleshoot challenges as they arose. Kian offered much needed technical support.

  Dara Culhane and Nancy Richler offered emotional and intellectual comradeship throughout. Justin Cammy was a great support in the crunch at the end.

  Many people generously shared their knowledge of specific subjects including Sheila Barkusky, Rahel Halabe and David Mivasair (the Hebrew language and traditional Jewish religious practice), Ri Turner (the transliteration of Hebrew words), Dan Gillis and Leonard Freedman (fishing), Harold Perloff (the Yiddish bird kingdom), Carl Wong (construction of musical instruments), and Konstantin Beznosov (the Russian language). Seymour Levitan helped me compose letters in Yiddish.

  Many people at Syracuse University Press helped to bring the initial manuscript to book form. Ken Frieden, Jennika Baines, and Deborah Manion offered the encouragement and wisdom I needed to refine the manuscript. Deb was determined enough to get me to finally release these wonderful stories for publication. Thank you to Brendan Missett, Victoria Lane, and Kay Steinmetz, who shepherded this book through the production process. Thank you, Lynn P. Wilcox, for the cover design.

  Lastly and most importantly, I want to thank my parents, Esther Freedman Mintz and Benjamin Mintz, who instilled in me a love of learning, intellectual curiosity and independence, and a joyful pride in the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture.

  If I have failed to mention anyone, please accept my apologies and gratitude.

  Helen Mintz

  Introduction

  HELEN MINTZ

  To earn the right to his pen, the writer must love hi
s protagonists. He must understand them and sympathize with them.

  —Abraham Karpinowitz1

  The epigraph, and a number of subsequent quotations from Abraham Karpinowitz, are from a 1995 interview conducted by Boris Sandler. This interview forms the basis for the film A serie fun Boris Sandler: monologn fun yiddishe shraybers: Avrom Karpinovitch (A Series by Boris Sandler: Yiddish Writers Monologues: Avrom Karpinovitch), Boris Sandler (New York: Forward Association, 2012), one of a series of DVDs about Israeli Yiddish writers. Sandler was kind enough to give me access to the entire interview, which provides an invaluable window into Karpinowitz’s life and work. Translations from Yiddish into English in this introduction are by Helen Mintz.

  The central character of Abraham Karpinowitz’s (Avrom Karpinovitsh in Yiddish) stories,2 lovingly rendered, is the city of his childhood and early adulthood, the Jewish city of Vilna (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) in the period between the two world wars. As David Volpe writes, “Vilna is the flaming center of Karpinowitz’s love. He uses all the colors of the storyteller’s palette to describe just one countenance—the city of Vilna.”3

  “Avrom Karpinovitch” is an alternate spelling of the author’s name, preferred by many Yiddishists.

  David Volpe, “Di sheynkayt fun Vilne,” Di goldene keyt 109 (1982): 209.

  The reader is introduced to Vilna by Jack Grossman, the narrator of the introductory story, “Vilna without Vilna.” An orphaned pickpocket in pre-Holocaust Vilna known then as Itzik the Hare, Grossman has become “a big shot” (p. 16), the owner of two hotels in Canada. Decades after leaving Vilna, he feels compelled to return to “see the city that raised me one more time. Her streets were my home; her people, my family” (p. 21). But Grossman’s return to Vilna is a journey into absence, a detailed and nuanced description of a world that no longer exists:

  And on my street? On my street there was always a commotion, like in an anthill. Every building had at least ten shops selling all kinds of goods: Tsalke the Nose and Khanovitsh with their ready-made clothing, Sarah Klok with her dressmaking notions, Taleykinski’s salami, Frumkin’s pharmacy, Bendel’s barbershop, Probe’s bakery. Is there anything you couldn’t find on that street? You could leave dressed, well fed, shaved, and with a remedy for a cough.

  Now mothers sit there with their children and old Lithuanian women knit little jackets. All on my street. Both sides of the street are now empty. You can’t even get a glass of water to quench your thirst. (pp. 18–19)

  Grossman mourns the city of his youth: “I stand on the corner that was once Gitke-Toybe’s Lane and I wait. Maybe someone will run up to me and shout, ‘Itsik! Itsik the Hare! Look at him.’ But there isn’t a single person left in Vilna who’d remember me” (p. 18), because the Vilna that the fictional Grossman is searching for no longer exists. The buildings and landmarks of Jewish Vilna, and more tragically, its inhabitants, have disappeared. Between 1941 and 1944, more than 90 percent of Vilna Jews were murdered, the majority of them shot and buried in open pits in the fields of Ponar, an area close to Vilna.

  For the twenty-first-century reader, the Holocaust shadows the lives of all Karpinowitz’s characters. But Karpinowitz steers us back to a more innocent time, when the brutality at Ponar is not only unknown to his characters but unimaginable. He guides his readers to maintain an awareness of the impending cataclysmic tragedy while at the same time cherishing the small but firmly held hopes of each character. Along with the writer, we love the characters and cheer for them, believing fully in the possibility of the fulfillment of their dreams.

  From as early as the nineteenth century and possibly even before that, Vilna was known as Yerushalayim d’Lite, the Jerusalem of Lithuania.4 The city boasted the majestic Great Synagogue as well as an extensive network of small prayer and study houses. The teachings of the Vilna Gaon, Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman Kremer (1720–1797), a Torah scholar and community leader, provide spiritual leadership to the present day. From the nineteenth century until the Holocaust, Vilna was famous for its publishing houses. These included both the Romm Publishing House, which in 1886 produced the revered Vilna Talmud among many other religious and secular texts, and the print shop of Rozenkrantz and Shriftzetser, where Abraham Karpinowitz’s father worked for a short time. The city also boasted a number of important religious and secular Jewish libraries, including the Strashun and Mefistei Haskalah Libraries.

  According to Dr. Izraelis Lempertas, a scholar and Vilna resident, there are various legends about the origin of the designation Yerushalayim d’Lite (Jerusalem of Lithuania): “It is said that when Napoleon saw [the city’s] numerous synagogues and witnessed the devotion of the Jews, he exclaimed, ‘It’s Jerusalem of Lithuania.’” Lempertas cites another legend that places the designation in the seventeenth century in recognition of the 333 Vilna Jews who knew the Talmud by heart (Izraelis Lempertas, Musu Vilne [Vilnius: Leidini Reme, 2003], 12).

  During the interwar period, when Karpinowitz’s stories are set, the city of Vilna was under Polish rule. This was a time of rising anti-Semitism and increasing impoverishment and economic marginalization of the Jewish population. Despite these pressures, interwar Vilna witnessed a flowering of Jewish cultural and intellectual life. Under the leadership of Max Weinreich, the headquarters of YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute) were established in 1925. The organization’s mandate was to collect, preserve, study, and disseminate information on Jewish language and culture in Eastern Europe. The Vilna literary group, Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna), included among its members the important Yiddish writers Chaim Grade, Abraham Sutzkever, and Shmerke Kaczerginski. Vilna boasted numerous Jewish newspapers, Yiddish and Hebrew language theatrical groups, several Jewish choirs and orchestras, a Jewish opera company, and a Jewish sports club.

  In his imaginative recreation of the vanished city of Vilna, Karpinowitz often blurs the line between fact and fiction. He intertwines the lived with the imagined and the realistic with the whimsical to create “literary authenticity, a storyteller’s truth, which he maintains even in the sometimes implausible and fanciful situations he creates.”5 Through a lens that sometimes reflects the realistic, sometimes the fanciful, and sometimes a skillful blending of both, Karpinowitz shows us how the shifting social, cultural, and political trends that rocked Jewish life played out in the lives of individual members of the amcha, the poor and disenfranchised Jews of Vilna. For example, in the two linked stories “The Folklorist” and “Chana-Merka the Fishwife,” Karpinowitz humanizes the activities of YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, through two fictionalized zamlers, or collectors of ethnographic material. In “The Folklorist,” Rubinshteyn, the main character, is thrilled with the folk material he has collected from Chana-Merka the Fishwife. But Chana-Merka has other ideas, and by the end of the story that bears her name, she has moved on to collecting and sharing material herself. Max Weinreich, the driving force behind YIVO, appears in both stories as a secondary character.

  Volpe, “Di sheynkayt fun Vilne,” 207.

  Like Chana-Merka and Rubinshteyn, the characters at the center of Karpinowitz’s stories are not the individuals traditionally associated with Jewish Vilna’s esteemed religious, intellectual, and cultural legacy. For Karpinowitz, these people had already been adequately memorialized. In his 1995 interview with Boris Sandler, the writer explained that the Vilna of his stories is “not the Vilna of the Vilna Gaon, nor the Vilna of Grodzenski, the shammes of the Great Synagogue. It is not the Vilna of the . . . intelligentsia, exemplified by Dr. Max Weinreich, the director of the Yiddish Scientific Institute. . . . There is no end to what people have written about the Vilna Gaon. And Dr. Max Weinreich has been immortalized in Yiddish linguistics and in the history of the Yiddish language.”6

  Abraham Karpinowitz, unpublished interview with Boris Sandler, 1995, Tel Aviv.

  Karpinowitz felt that it was the amcha who called out for his pen. He reminds us, “These individuals are also part of the Jewish people. We cannot separate ourselves from them. We mu
st not allow them to be forgotten” (Karpinovitsh 1995). The main characters of Karpinowitz’s stories are fishwives like Chana-Merka, barbers, shoemakers, and people like Jack Grossman, the pickpocket, who lived outside the law.

  The individuals traditionally associated with Vilna’s cultural and religious achievement are not entirely absent from Karpinowitz’s stories. But they do not take center stage. Instead, they play secondary roles, forming the backdrop for Karpinowitz’s heroes and heroines, the sets on the stage on which the amcha, the common people, live their lives. This is a delightful switch of emphasis from the relationship we have come to expect in fiction between well-known and esteemed individuals on the one hand and the “common” woman or man on the other.

  Karpinowitz maintained a particular respect and affection for Jews who lived outside the law, as exemplified in “The Lineage of the Vilna Underworld.” In this story, members of the Jewish underworld play pivotal roles in the lives of two important historical figures, Napoleon Bonaparte and Josef Pilsudski. The reader learns that the fictional Leybe the Fence offered Napoleon a place to stay when the Emperor retreated to Vilna after his defeat in Russia: “The emperor was sick: his bladder was weak, his hemorrhoids were torturing him, and he had stomach cramps from the terrible food. When he showed up at Leybe the Fence’s inn, he was frozen stiff” (p. 96). Fortunately for Napoleon, “Leybe’s wife saved the emperor. She cooked him chicken soup and gave him an herbal drink for his bladder. She also brought him a salve for his hemorrhoids” (p. 97). In this passage, we see not only a comic reversal of roles—Leybe and his wife are the saviors of the suffering Napoleon—but also an affectionate portrait of the petty criminal and his family. In a later historical period in the same story, Josef Pilsudski, who was to become the first head of state of Poland, enlists the help of the fictional Zelik the Benefactor, a well-respected member of the Vilna Jewish underworld, to help rob a train “carrying sacks of money.” Pilsudski needs these funds to finance “military units to take up arms against the tsar and win back Poland’s independence” (p. 98). During the robbery, “simply put, Zelik had saved Pilsudski’s life” (p. 99). Again, Karpinowitz’s skillful blending of fact and fiction allows him to affectionately exaggerate the importance of his main characters, in this case, members of the Vilna underworld.