Translation as Prosthesis: Yiddish Literature and Disability

• In Event: Bodies in Translation

Abstract

This project explores theories of the “prosthesis” through Yiddish literary texts.

In “Manifesto of the Disabled Text,” Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson write: “Translations, as disabled texts, pose the same challenges to the conventional norm as disabled bodies do. They deviate from monolingual textual expectations, and are thus deviant. They threaten to blur, and thus undermine, organizing binaries of social/textual/literary life (such as those defining dominant conceptions of gender/genre and racial/national/linguistic identity). ‘Compulsory ablebodiedness’ requires that translated texts function as docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of genred, raced, and classed bodily/textual function and appearance. […] Instead, translation is the prosthetic that calls attention to its own un-naturalness; it is the peg-leg that deterritorializes the body.”

My paper considers McSweeney and Göransson’s theory of translation as a disabled text in relation to Yiddish literature, which was itself constructed by eugenicists as a “disabled” form of German. I examine Yiddish “prosthetic” texts by Sholem Aleichem, Menke Katz, and others with insights from Disability Studies, mapping the potential convergences and divergences when theoretical models were built upon work in major languages.

In Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), for example, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that narrative in Western major literatures aims to change, cure, or transform the disabled: "A textual prosthesis alleviates discomfort by removing the unsightly from view. [T]he erasure of disability via a 'quick fix' of an impaired physicality or intellect removes an audiences' need for concern or continuing vigilance." For Sholem Aleichem, however, there is no cure in fictional small-town Kasrilevke, and there is no change, despite the threat or promise of modernization. Rather, I propose reading Sholem Aleichem's treatment of disability as part of a broader Yiddish narrative that resists cures and the promise of medicine, as it likewise resists narrative teleologies of reform, modernization, and Christianization.

By reading McSweeney, Göransson, Mitchell and Snyder together with Yiddish texts, we may elaborate a "prosthetic" theory rooted in the specificity of Ashkenazi history and minor literary genealogy.

Author

• Anna Torres, University of Chicago