Keylim: Used in “The Little Boy with the Samovar” and comes from the Hebrew kelim, a word that means vessels. Kelim is also the name of a tractate in the Mishnah, the foundational work of rabbinic literature, which set down in writing what had been transmitted as the Oral Torah. The tractate goes into detail about how to keep all kinds of vessels kosher, or ritually pure. The word is used for pots, pans, utensils, dishes, cups—anything that can be used to store or eat food. In the Kabbalah, the tradition of Jewish mysticism that influenced many Yiddish thinkers, kelim are the vessels that hold holy emanations. In “The Little Boy with the Samovar,” the king decrees that his subjects should give up all their lead, copper, and brass keylim (as spelled in transliterated Yiddish), so the term loses all Jewish context and refers to anything made of metal. Most Yiddish-English dictionaries translate keylim as vessels—but this story’s context gives rise to using metalware.
Nashn: Common but comes up particularly in “The King Who Licked Honey.” It comes from the German naschen, which means “to nibble or snack.” The word made its way into English as nosh, a relatively standard word for snacking or having a small meal. All these meanings, however, involve images of biting down on something. Yet, in the story, when the king is assured that no one is watching, he takes out his tongue and starts to nashn—an image that, with the tongue’s soft flesh, does not fit with a word like snack. And so, to give the sense of nashn, he instead sticks his tongue into the jar and “licks away.”
Sheyn: Common but is especially prominent in “The Enchanted Castle.” It comes from the German schön and is usually translated as beautiful, handsome, pretty, or lovely. It is found in the song “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn,” or “To Me You’re Beautiful,” written by Jacob Jacobs and Sholom Secunda for the Yiddish musical I Would If I Could (1932) and recorded in English by the Andrews Sisters, making both the song and the vocal group major hits. In the story, sheyn is the first word of the sentence the bearded old man asks the young men to say as they walk through the castle: “Sheyn is the person who treats others well, who is brave and courageous.” Sheyn, when used to describe someone’s character, refers to something beyond their appearance. While the Yiddish gut (pronounced goot) means good, sheyn does a little more—it suggests a person is good on the inside. So when we read Good is the person who treats others well, even though we don’t translate sheyn literally, we still sense that such a person is beautiful inside.
Shlang: Appears in “The Paper Kite” and comes to Yiddish from the German Schlange, which means snake. The story’s significance actually depends on the double meaning of the Yiddish shlang, which is both kite and snake. The plot hinges on the moment when the birds ask the kite what it is—and it says it is a shlang. The birds have never heard of a kite, so they mistake it for a snake. The misunderstanding causes them to fear the harmless paper kite. Since there’s no way to create this double meaning in English, and since the story includes lively descriptions of the kite’s tail, it’s possible to transfer the image of a snake from the kite to its snaky tail. The birds think the tail is a real snake and so are fearful of the kite.
Shmuesen: Used in many of the stories. It comes from the Hebrew shmu’ot, the plural of shmu’a, which refers to something heard. The root is used in the holiest Jewish prayer—the Shema—which beseeches the people of Israel to listen to the words being said. Because Hebrew words are often pronounced differently in Yiddish, shmu’ot becomes shmues—referring to things heard. Here we arrive at the Yiddish and modern Hebrew meaning of the word: rumors. Yiddish takes yet another step and turns the noun shmues into the verb shmuesen, which means to exchange rumors, to chat, to talk with each other. In America, the Yiddish shmuesen underwent another transformation into the English word schmooze, suggesting speaking with someone in order to make a connection. In the stories, when shmuesen is used, the American meaning of schmooze is missing altogether, and someone is simply talking with another person.
Shreklekh: Appears in “The Diamond Prince” and other stories. It comes from the German schrecklich, which means terrible, horrible, awful, dreadful, frightful, or terrifying. Most famously in American culture, it is related to the name of William Steig’s giant green ogre, Shrek. The Yiddish word shrek means fear, alarm, or terror, but Steig’s use of it in his children’s book creates another meaning. It suggests that what frightens us might not be as scary as we thought, and might even end up saving us. For the boy in “The Diamond Prince,” the sound of children crying is shreklekh—terrible. Steig unburied the Yiddish word, gave it richer meaning, and brought it back to life for future generations as something both scary and good.
Yid: Common, appearing in both “Broken In” and “The Enchanted Castle.” It means Jew and comes from the German Jude, derived from the Hebrew yehudi. But it is a difficult word to translate literally. Since Yiddish was spoken almost exclusively by Jews, when they referred to a yid, they just meant a man, and when referring to a woman they would say, yidene. One can say the man in Yiddish by merely saying der yid. But when yid was carried into other languages, it became pejorative, and the word is defined in English dictionaries as an offensive term for someone Jewish. When in “Broken In” the mother brings over a yid who is the teacher, it just means she brings over a man. And when in “The Enchanted Castle” we encounter a sentence like “The yid grew old,” again it just means “The man grew old.”
This collection found its way to the world thanks to two people—Beverly Horowitz and Susan Schulman—who believed in the idea of bringing the imagination of early-twentieth-century Yiddish writers into today’s stark reality. Their integrity made it possible to remain loyal to the women and men whose work is presented.
The stories owe their new renderings to the translators—Gavin Beinart-Smollan, Debra Caplan, Sandra Chiritescu, Ri J. Turner, and Lena Watson—who devoted much time and careful consideration to every word and punctuation mark. The collection also benefitted from the rigor of Jenny Golub, the book’s copy editor, who gave her full attention to every single detail. And special thanks to Rebecca Gudelis for her help. Extra thanks are due to Eliezer Niborski, for his innate thoroughness and linguistic expertise, and to Lena Watson, who was always there when needed.
It’s possible that none of these works would be accessible today without the efforts of libraries and archives across the world—including the Yiddish Book Center, the National Library of Israel, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the New York Public Library—all of which deserve the greatest appreciation and respect.
I owe special thanks to Professor Gennady Estraikh for tips on various lexical and contextual issues, and deep gratitude to Professor David Roskies for his historical insight, moral support, and ability to constantly see the larger picture.
I am especially grateful to Aleza, my wife, for being an indispensable partner and sounding board throughout the adventure of putting this collection together.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the authors, who often wrote these stories under difficult circumstances, and who—even if they couldn’t have foreseen the resurrection of their work—created tales that genuinely reflect the eternal spirit of their mother tongue.
LEON ELBE (1879–1928) was the pen name of Leyb Bassein. He was born in Minsk, Belarus, and served in the military in Panevėžys, then also part of the Russian Empire and today in Lithuania. He left for America around 1904 and settled in New York, where he wrote for the Yiddish press under a number of pseudonyms. His work often portrayed the lives of Jewish immigrants who left Russia during the first revolution, in 1905. He lost his wife in 1917, dedicating his 1919 collection In a Red Light to her memory. With Joel Entin, he coauthored the first American reader for learning Yiddish, Yiddish Sources (1916), and wrote children’s stories, including two series published as books: Barney the Teacher: His Lessons and War with Tricksters in the Land of Columbus (1914) and The Boy and the Ring (1929). He also published a collection of stories and poems called The Ways of Lit
tle Kids (1921), from which the tales in this book were taken. He worked for many years in the Yiddish educational system in New York.
SONYA KANTOR (unknown–1920) was a poet, writer, and educator. Her premature death is lamented in an obituary by Israel Rubin—one of the only extant sources referencing her—where he calls her “a person with a multifaceted erudition and, what’s even more important, with a pure and intuitive understanding of the new demands of modern education.” She was, it seems, a deeply devoted kindergarten teacher who’d known no Yiddish before going into the field of education. In her short life, she published two stories, included in this collection, and several translations of Ernest Thompson Seton and Rudyard Kipling, both of whom wrote about animals and may have influenced her. “Even greater than her written legacy,” writes Rubin in her obituary, “is the oral legacy she left behind, with tens and hundreds of songs, plays, and stories, which are dispersed among all the places where she worked—and she worked in many places all over Poland and occupied Lithuania.” She grew ill and died in Białystok, during the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921), and when Rubin heard of her death and went to search out her grave, the beadle at the cemetery said that scores of people had died in those difficult days, and that he had no idea where she’d been buried.
JACOB KREPLAK (1885–1945) was an author, editor, and journalist. He was born in Zabłudów, near Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire and now in northeastern Poland, and later served in the Imperial Russian Army’s Finnish Guards’ Rifle Battalion, based in Helsinki. Kreplak deserted the army and fled to Antwerp, Belgium, where he worked as a diamond cutter while becoming active in Yiddish cultural life. He started publishing stories in 1911, writing for Yiddish newspapers and journals in Poland and Belgium and authoring his first collection, The Situation in Finland, in 1913. At the outbreak of World War I, Kreplak left Antwerp, arriving in America in 1915. His wife, Anna, and their daughter Sulamitis arrived in 1916, and their daughter Mary was born in New York in 1917. Around this time, he began writing for children, and he later published a collection titled Youth (1935), with legends from different cultures and stories about both the Old World and America.
MOYSHE NADIR (1885–1943) was the pen name of Isaac Reiss (Yitzhak Rayz). He was born in 1885 in Narayev, a town in Eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today in Ukraine. In 1898, at age thirteen, Nadir immigrated with his family to New York. He did not grow up among Jews and studied in an English-language school until age sixteen. He worked as an insurance agent and window dresser, among other jobs, before discovering the Yiddish press. His earliest publications, including “Dreadfully Bad Little Poems” and “Passable Prose,” appeared in the Daily Jewish Herald in 1902. He soon became known as a humorist, satirist, and poet. His first collection of poems was Wild Roses (1915), and he also wrote essays, stories, and plays, publishing dozens of books, including Children Unfettered (1936), from which the stories in this collection were taken. He playfully created many pseudonyms before settling on Nadir, a Yiddish expression that can be roughly translated as Take it!
JACOB REISFEDER (1890–c. 1942) has largely been forgotten despite writing novels, stories, plays, and poems. He was born to a Hasidic family in Warsaw, had a traditional religious education until age eighteen, and started writing in 1908. He was part of the Yiddish press in Poland, including as a staff writer for the newspaper Haynt from 1911 to 1915. He traveled to Argentina in 1923 but later returned to Poland. In the mid 1930s, he was on the editorial board of Unzer Express. He was married, and eyewitness accounts suggest he took part in literary evenings in the Warsaw ghetto, where it appears his life ended.
RACHEL SHABAD (1898–1974) was better known by her married name, Regina Weinreich. Born in Vilna—then part of the Russian Empire and now in Lithuania—she was the daughter of Zemach Shabad, a doctor, communal leader, and cultural activist who created and supported educational, vocational, and political opportunities for Jews in Eastern Europe. Regina married Yiddish linguist and YIVO cofounder Max Weinreich, whom she met when they were both teachers in Vilna. Regina and Max were traveling in Denmark with their eldest son, Uriel, when World War II broke out in 1939. Max and Uriel traveled to New York, while Regina went back to Vilna for their younger son, Gabriel. In 1940, the family reunited in New York, where Max turned YIVO’s American office into its world headquarters. Uriel Weinreich went on to become one of modern Yiddish’s greatest linguists, lexicographers, and educators, while his brother, Gabriel, became a professor of physics at the University of Michigan. Regina Weinreich is virtually unknown as a writer, and the stories in this collection are attributed to her for the first time. They were most likely published around 1920 in Warsaw, under her Hebrew first name, Rachel, and her last name before marriage, Shabad.
GAVIN BEINART-SMOLLAN is a doctoral student in History and Judaic Studies at New York University.
DEBRA CAPLAN is an Assistant Professor of Theater at Baruch College, City University of New York.
SANDRA CHIRITESCU is a doctoral student in Yiddish Studies at Columbia University.
DAVID STROMBERG is a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Jerusalem.
RI J. TURNER is an MA student in Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
LENA WATSON is a Yiddish translator based in London.
DAVID STROMBERG is a writer, translator, and literary scholar. His translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Asymptote, and his fiction in Ambit, Chicago Literati, and the East Bay Review. He is the author of four collections of single-panel cartoons, including Baddies, and a crictical study, Narrative Faith. He lives in Jerusalem.
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In the Land of Happy Tears Page 11
