Re-Discovering the Shtetl in the German Sholem Asch and Dovid Bergelson

• In Event: Translation and Yiddish: New Approaches

Abstract

This paper explores the role of translation in transforming (or attempting to transform) the way readers of German, Jewish or otherwise, viewed Yiddish literature and the East European Jewish shtetl. Early attempts to translate and transmit Yiddish literature into German typically re-framed the shtetl in terms of the “ghetto,” and often thereby subsuming the writing of Yiddish writers like I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem under the German genre “ghetto literature,” which typically differed in notable ways from their literary experiments in Yiddish. “Ghetto” stories, for instance, often contrasted for German audiences the narrowness of the (Yiddish-speaking) ghetto with the open, liberal world of the Germans.

In this paper, I argue that later German translators—by the 1910s and then especially after World War I—turned to two different writers with diametrically opposed poetics and literary styles in the attempt to present the shtetl anew to German readers. Although they offered very different images of the shtetl, the translations of both Asch and Bergelson’s work broke with the tendency to conflate “shtetl” with “ghetto” as the habitat of East European Jews. Asch’s work in some ways resembled the German ghetto-genre, which, at times, indulged in nostalgic views of the world of older generations, but also differed by offering a much more variegated view. Bergelson’s anti-romantic view, in turn, took the materials of the shtetl and transformed them in ways that gave rise to innovative prose writing in Yiddish related to broader European literary trends, and hence linking an ostensibly provincial location to cosmopolitan artistic concerns. In its conclusion, this paper attempts to assess the relative success (or failure) that translations of Asch’s and Bergelson’s had in the German context.

Author

• Jeffrey A. Grossman, University of Virginia