And the opposite happened--Esther 9:1
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "[Un es iz gevorn farkert]"--Yehoash translation of Esther 9:1
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "[Un er hot gezen dafke farkert]"--"Moses" segment (Gordin, Ale shriftn 197)
"And he saw, on the contrary, the opposite." -Translation of Gordin (Ale shriftn 197)
This article will examine the historical context, thematic content, and translation problems associated with a turn-of-the-century satire by Jacob Gordin that also pits Moses, Jesus, and Karl Marx against the realities of twentieth-century life in the US. First published in the Yiddish American press, Gordin's piece, and other examples of modern American Jewish humor such as assimilationist rabbi jokes and Lenny Bruce's stand-up routine, "Christ and Moses," spring from the same cultural sources that produced the badkhonim (wedding jesters) and carnivalesque purimshpils (Purim plays), recycling and updating age-old motifs in Jewish folklore. (1)
From Abraham's bold-faced reproach in Genesis 18, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?" and his marketplace-inspired bargaining with God over the number of righteous required to save the city of Sodom from destruction (down from the original asking price of fifty to the bargain price of ten), to one of Woody Allen's preferred formulas coupling the sublime with the mundane, "Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends" (Allen 33) (2), Jews have had a tradition of taking God to task for perceived faults with God's universe in the twin forms of lamentations (sacralizing the profane) and jokes (profaning the sacred). God is perceived as the original source of this duality: the Book of Lamentations asks, "Out of the mouth of the Most High, do not both good and evil come?" (3:38), while the Yiddish proverb, A mentsh trakht, un got lakht (literally, "A person thinks, and God laughs"; more familiar in English is the proverb, "Man proposes, God disposes"), suggests not only that the best-laid plans of mice and men go astray if that is God's will, but also that God is not above laughing at us. "He who sits in the heavens laughs," the Psalms tell us (2:1). (3)
Yet laughter also makes us more divine. This idea, which appears in Western thought with Aristotle's maxim, "Of all living creatures only man is endowed with laughter," sees laughter as God-like and God-given, and therefore something, like the soul, that separates us from animals (Bakhtin, Rabelais 68-69). In Jewish tradition as well, the gift of laughter is equivalent to the gift of civilization itself in the form of the Laws of Moses: one Talmudic commentator writes, "Purim is as great as the day on which the Torah was given on Sinai" (Rubenstein 275). For the uninitiated, Purim is to Passover as Carnival is to Easter--a short period of satiric lunacy before the solemnities begin. The source is the Biblical Book of Esther.
The holiday of Purim has been especially influential in establishing a central role for humor in Jewish culture. On Purim, Jews laugh at Haman's humiliation as his plans to destroy the Jews are reversed ("And the opposite happened," Esther 9:1); they do not gather in solemn remembrance of the threat he posed, or their deliverance from it, as on so many other holidays. The earliest instances of parody in Jewish literature are predominately Purim-related: a thirteenth-century collection of maxims written in imitation of a portion of the Passover service urges "all good Jews to eat well and to drink plenteously on the night of Purim" (Doniach 237).
The medieval Midrash Abba Guryon has scenes in heaven, with Satan playing the part of Haman, and God playing the part of King Akhashverosh:
Meanwhile in Heaven Satan had explained before the Lord Almighty
the folly and the sinfulness of his people Israel. "Let Israel be
destroyed!" said God; "bring me a roll that I may record the
decree of destruction!" (Doniach 207)
Then the figure of a woman who is "none other than the Torah," but who is clearly playing the role of Esther, enters God's throne-room and pleads for the reversal of the decree. But it has already gone forth, and Elijah has to run around in a rather undignified manner to get it back. There are scenes of the utmost urgency between Elijah and Moses in heaven and Mordecai on earth that could easily be read as comical. Once the decree is recovered,
the Holy One (blessed be He!) took up the clay seal record of
destruction and in His wrath broke it into pieces and cast them
upon the earth. They fell on the King Ahasuerus and fright and
sleeplessness came over him, for do we not read: "And the sleep of
the king was disturbed"? (Doniach 210)
As a Purim midrash, it was certainly not meant to be taken seriously, but this paralleling of Satan/Haman convincing the gullible and fickle God/Akhashverosh to produce a royal decree condemning the Jews even has the figure of God playing a role in the farce. If the laughter produced by this physical and verbal interaction between heaven and earth brings humanity closer to the divine, then it is also true that the best-laid plans of divine beings can go as awry as any human undertaking. "The opposite" can happen to them, too. (4)
Purim is also an appropriate inspiration for a socialist thinker such as Gordin because it is the one Jewish holiday that contains no miracle ascribed to divine intervention, (5) Paradoxically, the holiday that brings us "divine" laughter is centered around the reading of a scroll in which the divine name of God is never mentioned; thus the Book of Esther is both sacred and profane. This is entirely in keeping with the "opposite" world of Purim.
But there is bitterness as well. Purim is also "the holiday of Diaspora. It is the only Jewish holiday that celebrates an event which took place in Diaspora, and, as such, it is a key symbol of Jewish culture" (Boyarin 2-3). Perhaps one could thereby extrapolate and declare the predominance of bitter, ironic satire and carnivalesque-yet-cerebral parody to be one of the defining conditions of Jewish life in Diaspora as well. The paradoxes of being "chosen" yet living in exile, being rich in intellect and culture but poor in security, comfort, and "belonging," produced the polar opposites of lamentations and belly-laughs, the familiar "laughter through tears." After all, even polar opposites are attached to the same pole. (6)
Judith Stora-Sander writes that
the mixture of the sublime and the trivial is found throughout
Jewish literature. It springs from the very spirit of Judaism as
reflected in the Talmudic debates, where all aspects of life are
taken into account.
There is no duality between the mind and body, between the
miraculous and the prosaic. (217)
Bakhtin writes that a related world view was present among Christians in the Middle Ages, but was suppressed during the Age of Reason. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century illuminated Christian manuscripts, images of saints and "purely grotesque, carnivalesque themes" are presented "on the same page, which like medieval man's consciousness contains both aspects of life and the world"; the decorations of medieval churches "present a similar coexistence of the pious and the grotesque" (Bakhtin, Rabelais 96). (7)
Perhaps this accounts for some of the popularity of purimshpils among Christians. Sources indicate that a performance in Frankfort in 1713 of a Purim play about Joseph and his brothers, containing a German-derived clown figure, Pickelharing, drew such interest from the Christian community that two soldiers were brought in to keep the crowd back (Shatsky in Goodman, 359; "Purim Plays" 279). Contrary to the view expressed by some that Jewish humor is fundamentally "masochistic," self-parody is also a sign of humanity. (8)
If in the Jewish tradition of reason, no question is ever completely answered, no position completely final--Midrash often asks one to consider the reverse or at least several alternate readings of a passage (cf. Rubenstein 269) imagine the anti-semitic authorities' response to the great leveler of laughter, and the festival of reversal, Purim. Harold Fisch argues that in Purim parodies, the main target is "precisely that alien culture whose customs the celebrant adopts in his feasting and drinking" (68; this is reflected in the Yiddish folk saying, "Shiker vi a goy," "Drunk as a goy" [cf. Steinlauf 56]). If Christians could laugh with the Jews, who were laughing at themselves and at Christians, then the ideology that demonized the Jews could have been endangered. Why else should the Christian authorities have prohibited their Christian subjects from attending the purimshpils, as they did, for example, in Italy and Germany in the 1700s? (Shatsky in Goodman, 359; "Purim Plays" 279) Laughter, like eating a meal while reclining, is also a symbol of freedom.
These public performances must have contained a great deal of dialogue in the vernacular.(9) In "Moyshe Rabeynu, Yezus Kristus un Karl Marx tsu gast in Nyu York," Jacob Gordin makes fun of Jesus, but he does so in Yiddish. He probably would never have done it in English, and certainly not in Russian while he was living there under the Tsar's regime.
This short satire, probably written between 1897-1902, is quite unlike the austere tragedy of Jacob Gordin's full-length dramas.(10) Although it is overtly socially conscious, it uses exaggerated typage and acerbic laughter rather than Gordin's familiar Ibsenesque realism to highlight society's evils. The theme and the narrative structure place this satire in the tradition of purimshpil couplets, which often begin with a sacred Hebrew expression, only to profane it immediately afterwards (see Cahan 255-56 and Sandrow 11). When Moses comes down from heaven and finds corruption on earth, he repeats his commandments in Biblical Hebrew, only to get threatened and spat on by New York Jews, then beaten up by a policeman. Jesus and Marx undergo similar indignities at the hands of their "believers."
But "Moyshe Rabeynu" is not just a parody of the sacred, which in some ways is an easy target. It also appears to be a parody of Gordin's own work: (11) One of Gordin's most important plays, Got, mentsh un tayvl (God, Man and the Devil, 1903), opens with a prologue set in heaven in which Satan declares
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[monoton un langvaylig tsit zikh do in di himlen di tsayt, un nor
mayne nayes fun der menshn-velt muntern zey do a bisl oyf] (Gordin
1911, 6)
Heaven is monotonous and boring. The only thing that cheers them
up a bit is the news I bring from the world of people.
Satan then challenges God, presumably out of boredom, to produce a human soul whom he (Satan) cannot corrupt. "Moyshe Rabeynu" also begins in heaven, with Moses, Jesus, and Karl Marx challenging each other as to which of their competing religions has the most adherents on earth, (12) Central to this satire, and the source of much of the humor, is the idea that the heavenly folk do not have a clue about what is going on on earth, something that Satan also claims is the case in the sacred version of heaven in Got, mentsh un tayvl. In order for the jokes to work, Moses, Jesus, and Marx must be portrayed as Bakhtinian "innocents," characters whose innocence permits them to stumble into and thereby unmask hypocrisy (cf. Bakhtin, Dialogic 163-64). Got, mentsh un tayvl ends with the "happy" tragedy of a death-scene redemption; "Moyshe Rabeynu" ends with a triumph that never occurred: the triumph of socialism in the US. Gordin was well-acquainted with our interrelated polar opposites of laughter and lamentation.
The son of a maskil (an educated follower of the haskala, or enlightenment movement), Gordin was most comfortable writing in Russian and had to learn, or at least significantly improve, his Yiddish in order to reach the Jewish masses in the US and to achieve his goal of educating them (Shatzky 128; Epstein 138, 142; Sandrow 132). He wanted to bring "men of widely different social ranks to one intellectual level" (Shatzky 135). When he arrived in the US in 1891, many radical thinkers viewed Yiddish only as a means of reaching the workers, not as a literary end in itself. Many conservative thinkers still derided Yiddish as "the corrupt language of Babylon for maids and coachmen" (Noble 86), which is precisely why the radical thinkers wanted to use it.
The position Gordin displays in "Moyshe Rabeynu" lies somewhere in between. As a dedicated scientific socialist, he is clearly unfriendly to old-world religious Orthodoxy, yet he quotes freely and respectfully from the Hebrew Bible (he taught for several years in the Talmud Torah in Yelizavetgrad; Lifschutz 152). No group is spared: he aims his pointed criticism at the hypocritical practices of radicals and conservatives, of Jews, Christians, and socialists in the US. (13)
Religious parody was fairly widespread among the Jewish socialist intellectuals. In 1892 in New York, Israel Davidson published a Hebrew parody of the religious dictum, "The world is sustained by three things: by Torah and by worship and by loving deeds," which reads, "The world [is sustained by] three things: money and money and again money" (Davidson 99). Morris Winchevsky produced many parodies in Hebrew such as his socialist "Prayer of Faith," published in England in 1903, which begins,
I believe with perfect faith, that whoever profits by the labor
of his fellow man without doing anything for him in return, is a
willful plunderer....
I believe with perfect faith, that women will remain the slaves
of men, or their playthings, as long as they will depend upon the
will of others instead of enjoying the fruit of their own labor.
I believe with perfect faith, that labor and handicraft will be
despised by all as long as the working men will labor to satisfy the
appetites of the idlers. (quoted in Davidson 81)
These works strike the contemporary reader more as attacks on capitalism than on religion. Indeed, in "Moyshe Rabeynu," Gordin criticizes the lack of Biblically-inspired righteousness in American society (as well as the Marxist kind). The general audience for such parodies in Hebrew, even if they were socialists, would have been on familiar terms, and probably somewhat respectful terms, with religious tradition. Gordin fits this model.
The plot of "Moyshe Rabeynu" is relatively simple and straightforward. There is equality in heaven. Moses is a respected figure who lives in harmony with the founders of two other world religions, Buddha and Jesus (although Jesus is depicted as something of a naif); even Karl Marx is capable of civil exchange with his "adversaries." All that changes once they come down to earth, where the three celestial visitors are insulted, threatened, manhandled, and, of course, not recognized for who they really are. Did disillusion with life in the US prompt Gordin to write a "profane" version of his "sacred" goal of bringing "men of widely different social ranks to one intellectual level"? In this story, all are brought down to the level of the gutter. Although Moses and Jesus are bruised and beaten, it is humanity that is criticized for having done these things. (14)
Even the seemingly unmerciful and iconoclastic Lenny Bruce took this approach in his stand-up routine, "Christ and Moses," in which the title characters are presented as being "possessed with humility and wisdom" (Bruce). The real targets of Bruce's satire are the figures of Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Sheen, Reform rabbis ("so Reform they're ashamed they're Jewish"), the discrepancy between religious doctrine and practice, the wealth and hypocrisy of the Church, and the socioeconomic injustices in New York City circa 1960. Both Gordin and Bruce have jokes about Christ and Moses taking contemporary modes of transport: in the Gordin piece, they take an elevator "from the seventh heaven straight to the roof of the Hebrew Institute" (Gordin, Ale shriftn 195); Lenny Bruce has them taking "Transcontinental [airlines], $88 to Chicago." Both authors get in a dig at the immigration authorities: in "Moyshe Rabeynu," Buddha protests that he should be allowed to visit New York as well, and Marx answers, "they won't let you in," thanks to the new Commissioner of Immigration (Gordin, Ale shriftn 194); Lenny Bruce has reporters from Newsweek asking if Christ and Moses have "State Department clearance." (15)
In "Moyshe Rabeynu," topical humor includes unflattering references to the Reverend Charles Henry Parkhurst (1842-1933), a Presbyterian reformer; Terence Vincent Powderly (1849-1924), head of the Knights of Labor from 1879-1893, who was appointed US Commissioner General of Immigration by President McKinley, a position he held from 1897-1902; and Daniel De Leon (18521914), the Jewish socialist who split from the Socialist Labor Party in 1895, after calling trade union leaders "labor fakers," a reference that turns up in the Karl Marx segment. (16)
Many of the situations in "Moyshe Rabeynu" are still timely today: immigration restrictions, dishonesty and ruthlessness in business, factional political in-fighting that prevents any real progress, etc. The only truly dated element is the upbeat ending, in which Gordin envisions an army of workers leading a triumphant struggle to establish a just and humane socialism in the US. Bakhtin writes that the carnivalesque represents the "living possibility" of the return of Saturn's Golden Age on earth (Bakhtin, Rabelais 48). Gordin, a true Marxist, places this Golden Age in the future. It is a sad commentary on our times that prejudice, brutality, and corruption are still with us, but hope for a utopian future is not.
Recent developments in the fields of literary, popular, and cultural studies have legitimized the claim that popular works once deemed marginal or even trivial can yield complex revelations about the societies that produce and consume them. The translation issues in this deceptively simple tale are multiform. Even the title poses some problems, appearing in variant forms in different manuscripts.(17)The name "Moses" is also a problem. The Yiddish text uses the Hebrew spelling, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (mem-shin-hey), which would be pronounced "Moshe" in Biblical and modern Hebrew, but certainly would have been pronounced "Moyshe" by the American Yiddish audience around 1900 (and of course the modern English reader calls him "Moses"). This translation favors "Moyshe Rabeynu" when that familiar, formal title is used in the Yiddish, and "Moses" most other times. (18)
The Yiddish of this satire reproduces the polyglot speech of the community that inspired it. Zalmen Zylbercweig lists "Yezus Kristus" along with a few other sketches in which Gordin "uses simple folk-jests and 'builds' stories around them"(Zylbercweig 398). This strongly suggests a cultural precedent: there must have been Jewish jokes about what would really happen if Moses (or Jesus) came down to visit "our" world, and how they would be treated. In this sense, this satire is a far cry from Gordin's better-known "Realist and Modernist renderings" for the stage (Wamke 247). In "Moyshe Rabeynu," we have the textualization of a popular joke motif, one man's version of an oral folk-tale aimed at urban Jews speaking Yiddish mixed with American English, written by a man whose first literary language was Russian, employing a great deal of Biblical Hebrew, dozens of daytshmerisms (Germanisms) that Uriel Weinreich's Modern English/Yiddish, Yiddish/English Dictionary informs us are "inadmissible in the standard language" (Weinreich xl), in addition to a few words that are only to be found in Russian, Polish, and German dictionaries.
Although Bakhtinian dialogics propose that no language is monolithic, Yiddish literature is based on the "procedure of mixing several registers of language" (Stora-Sander 216). Yiddish itself is "shot through with the carnivalesque" (Steinlauf 58; indeed, the modern reader may have some difficulty with turn-of-the-century Yiddish texts because of the variant spellings and non-standard vocabulary).(19) Gordin was no stranger to the literary uses of the various Yiddishes. In Got, mentsh un tayvl, Satan speaks a high-toned Germanic Yiddish in heaven; "when he comes to earth disguised as a lottery ticket peddler" he speaks the same Yiddish as anyone else on Hester Street (Sandrow 151).
How is a translator to address these diverse linguistic complexities and accomodate the modern reader at the same time? In a remarkably prescient essay in the 1956/1957 volume of the YIVO Annual, Rhoda S. Kachuck states that
Yiddish, unlike French, German or Spanish, is studied today by
relatively few young people; the reputation of Yiddish literature is
therefore more dependent upon responsible translators than is that
of the other languages mentioned. (Kachuck 41)
In order to do justice to this multilingual representation of an immigrant society, I have retained some Yiddish terms, most of the Biblical Hebrew (rendered in the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Gordin's audience, the vast majority of the Jewish immigrant population, rather than the Sephardic [modern Israeli] pronunciation), and even a few of the English words, which would have been foreign in the original, are treated as "foreign" in the translation.
The tendency from the 1950s until quite recently has been for translators to eliminate the Hebrew completely as "too foreign" and unfamiliar to the English reader, or for the sake of "smoothness," yet they often substitute jarringly inappropriate stock English-language cliches in the place of passages that are marked in the original as being indisputably sacred, even if deliberately misused by a character such as Sholem Aleichem's Tevye. Kachuck cites Sholem Aleichem's active participation in the translation of several volumes of his works into Russian in 1910-11: his translator proposed
rendering Tevye's quotations in Hebrew in a Latin transcription,
with their meaning explained by means of footnotes in Russian....
Sholem Aleichem objected vehemently, proposing instead that Tevye's
quotations be translated into a stylized Church Slavonic. (60)
One must ask: if a translator is going to transcribe a source language that the average target language reader does not know and supply explanatory footnotes, why not transcribe the Hebrew? Obviously, Tsarist Russia circa 1910 is a very specific historical time and place that may have required such displacement devices, but these devices should not have been used in the US in the 1950s, nor are they relevant today. Contemporary translators have been increasingly willing to retain some of the foreign words and concepts from the source texts, challenging the reader to make the effort to look up the explanations in a glossary. While this practice could be dismissed as a lack of creativity--or just plain laziness in some cases it is necessary in order to avoid cheating the reader.
In this satire, Gordin often cites the Hebrew and then provides a Yiddish translation of it (clearly a significant portion of his intended audience was expected to be familiar with the sound but not necessarily the meaning of Biblical Hebrew). For example, he writes,
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[mayn fraynt, zogt tsu im Moyshe, veyst ir den nit, az Moyshe hot
aykh gezogt: Evven shleyma vetsedek yiheyeh lekha (A rikhtige vog
un gerekhtigkayt zoln zayn bay dir)? (Gordin, Ale shriftn 196)
The translation follows the parallel Hebrew-Yiddish phrasing of the original with a Hebrew-English phrasing
"My friend," Moses said to him, "don't you know that Moses has
commanded you: Evven shleyma vetsedek yiheyeh lekha (A perfect
and just weight shalt thou have)?"
and explains the reference to Devarim/Deuteronomy 25:15 in an endnote. Sometimes, however, Gordin gives the Hebrew only, without a Yiddish translation:
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Gevalt, bay yidn zol zayn azoyns? Ikh hob dokh aykh gezogt: Loy
siheyeh kedeysha mi-bnoys Yisroel? (Ale shriftn 198)
Rather than send the reader to the glossary, it makes sense to reproduce the parallel pattern introduced previously by the author:(20)
Gevalt, how could Jews act this way? Haven't I told you Loy siheyeh
kedeysha mi-bnoys Yisroel?--There shall be no harlot of the
daughters of Israel?
That "gevalt" represents another translation issue: which handful of Yiddish words does one choose to keep? In this translation, I have kept balebos, gevalt, goyishe, khutspe and peyes, supplying definitions in a glossary (khutspe is actually in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary under "chutzpah"; goy is in there, too), and shnorers and meshugener are followed by the English in a parallel construction. But when Gordin at one point has Jesus say, "Vey iz mir" (200), I just had to leave that as is.
Although one may retain the flavor of Biblical Hebrew with the justifiable use of parallel Hebrew-English passages (such as those cited above), much of the Hebrew element of standard Yiddish sadly must be lost in translation (something is always lost in translation). As Moses Rischin has written, turn-of-the-century Jews were "a people whose esthetic joys sprang from the Hebrew word, who detected the flavor of Isaiah in ordinary family correspondence" (140). But we should also focus on how much a translation preserves of the original. And for this, there is no one recipe.
When Gordin, describing a scene in heaven, writes
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[untern altn eyts hakhayim iz gezesn Moyshe Ben Amrom] (Ale
shriftn 193)
the translation reads: "Under the ancient Eytz Hakhayim, the Tree of Life, sits Moyshe Ben Amrom, Moses son of Amrom." At this point, the average reader should be aware that we are in a Jewish heaven, with the original Hebrew words being presented and then translated, without any loss of narrative flow. Indeed, one of my goals in using such parallel constructions is precisely to make the reading experience richer by preserving as many of the original elements as is aesthetically reasonable.
If some high and lofty Hebrew adds an air of the divine to the humble Yiddish text, the borrowings from English do precisely the opposite: many of them represent American life at its most crass and materialistic. Some of the Englishisms in "'Moyshe Rabeynu" include: trost (trust, monopoly), grinhorn, biznes, "Get aut of hier," "Gad dem yu doirty sheenee," tenement, boss, fektori, polisman, and feyker. Such multilingual borrowing is a common immigrant phenomenon, and it seems reasonable to transliterate some of these terms back into English, retaining their Yiddish spellings to mark them as "foreign," particularly when they occur in dialogue or passages discussing life in the US. (21)
A recurrent translation issue involves those source culture concepts or expressions where some additional explanation must be added to preserve meaning or clarity. One such problem area is the use of diminutives. When Newton says
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[Es is merkverdig mit di yidelekh] (Gordin, Ale shriftn 194)
it would be awkward to give a literal translation such as, "That is noteworthy among the little Jews." If the diminutive is meant as a term of endearment (and "little Jews" is not a term of endearment in English), then some words must be shifted around to carry over more of the true meaning of the original, for example: "That's one thing I've noticed about our dear friends, the Jews." But it has been suggested that Newton's use of the diminutive may be less than flattering in this instance, so I have tweaked the text a little into the more ambiguous, "That's one thing I've noticed about our fine friends, the Jews."
One other example is the term hekhsheyrim. The Yiddish says:
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[Er hot gezen, az di rabonim anshtot akhtung tsu gebn oyf Moyshe's
Toyrah shraybn hekhsheyrim un fabritsirn naye mistves]. (Gordin,
Ale shriftn 198)
Weinreich defines hekhsheyrim simply as "rabbinical approval" (Weinreich 636), but a translation needs to explain both the term itself and the context in which it is placed in order for the target audience to get a more "accurate" rendition of the original. (22) I wrestled with many possible translations: "Kosher document"; "Certificate of Kosherization"; even a complete explanation, "documents certifying anything to be Kosher"; before I realized that the problem was not the noun hekhsheyrim, but the verb, shraybn (to write). The basic meaning of the passage is that instead of carrying out the spirit of the Torah, the rabbis are doing business selling their authority to declare things to be kosher. I therefore changed "writing" to "selling" and the rest fell into place: "He had seen how rabbis, instead of following his Torah, were busy selling Kosher Seals of Approval, and creating new mitzves, new commandments."
One other justification for the repetitive parallel phrases and extra explanatory words is that the original Yiddish contains so many instances of oral repetition. This is a characteristic of spoken Yiddish, and therefore of literary transcriptions of spoken Yiddish, that should be reproduced to some extent in the English text. These repetitions have permitted me the rare luxury of parallel phrasing without significantly altering the syntax of the original in many cases. Aside from the Yiddish/Hebrew parallelisms, Gordin's text sometimes uses two consecutive adjectives that basically have the same meaning, in order to double their effect. For example, when Moses opens a door
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[un zeta sheyne, prekhtige shul] (Gordin, Ale shriftn 198)
both of these words essentially mean "pretty," but rather than describing what he saw as "a pretty, pretty synagogue," it seems to suggest that he saw "a beautiful--a magnificent--synagogue." English rarely permits the stringing together of synonymous adjectives at the rate that a "carnivalesque" language such as Yiddish does, but excessive streamlining of Yiddish syntax in order to squeeze it into the dominant standards of English literary modernism is no longer justifiable. Another example would be when Moses laments that his religion only lives in
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("toyte opgeshtorbene formen," Gordin, Ale shriftn 199), which really means "dead, dead forms," or, more idiomatically, "dead twice over." I have translated this as "dead, lifeless forms."
Our Jewish forebears may have drastically altered their customs and appearance in order to assimilate into American society, but the Yiddish stories that they told, and the Yiddish books that they read and wrote, should be brought into American English without cutting off their peyes, fixing their accents, and ignoring their politics--in short, without stripping them of precisely those elements that make them Yiddish. If not, why translate at all?
Notes
(1.) For a discussion of a distinct brand of American Jewish humor involving Jewish and Christian clergy, see Cray (this particular joke is not included in his article).
(2.) Or, in another well-known example, a rabbi (a rich man in some versions) orders a pair of pants from a tailor, who inexplicably takes six weeks (or up to six months) to deliver them. "Tell me, my friend," says the rabbi, "if it took God only six days to create our vast and complicated world, why did it have to take you six weeks to make this simple pair of pants?" "But Rabbi!" answered the tailor triumphantly, "Just look at the mess God made, and then look at this beautiful pair of pants!" (This version adapted from Ausubel 16).
(3.) See Fisch (68), and also Knox.
(4.) Gordin's own plans were frustrated many times in his life. He believed in agrarian assimilation for Russian Jews, but his Ukranian town of Yelizavetgrad was "one of the first victims" of the pogroms of 1881 (Lifschutz 153). He stayed ten more years, but after police searched his home, he emigrated to the US hoping to found a utopian agricultural commune, which did not last (161; cf. also Epstein 141; Sandrow 133). In 1904, Gordin "tried to manage a theater that played his own repertory" and went bankrupt (Sandrow 161).
(5.) It may be pure legend. "'It is impossible to find any historical parallel for a Jewish consort" to the Persian King Xerxes (Khshayarha, or Akhashverosh). "In view of all the evidence the authority of the Book of Esther as a historical record must definitely be rejected" ("Esther," The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 5, 236; The Encyclopaedia Judaica also notes the "late" language of the Book, "the lack of any reference to Purim in Jewish literature before the first century B.C.E.," and "the striking resemblance between the names Mordecai and Esther to the Babylonian gods Marduk and Ishtar" as further reasons to doubt the historical origin of the Esther story; ["Purim," Vol. 13, 1391]). David Frischman writes, "If the other festivals are called 'festivals by act of heaven,' then we may be justified in calling this holiday a 'festival by act of man'" (Goodman 162).
(6.) Blacher-Cohen sums it up nicely: the Jews of Eastern Europe, humor was their "life preserver" (14): "The butt of a cruel joke, they found that God had singled them out to be a light unto the nations, but had given them a benighted existence. Powerful in interpreting the vast complexities of sacred texts, they were powerless in their dealings with brainless peasants" (2).
(7.) Purim is also quite unlike the Christian Camival in many ways. Instead of several days or even weeks of revelry, the two-day festival's central mitsve involves the reading of a sacred-yet-secular text that does not need to be parodied because it already contains parody. While the Christian celebrant of Carnival is freed from virtually all restrictions on behavior, "fear of the possible hostile reactions of Christians" in eighteenth-century Europe was an important factor in the Jewish self-restriction of the symbolic beating of Haman (Goodman 324-25). In 1750, Frederick the Great of Prussia issued an edict which states that for their own "protection," Jews "must refrain from all improper excesses in their festivals, particularly during the so-called Haman or Purim festival" (327-28). Such restrictions on laughter produce the laughing up one's sleeve that could also be considered a dominant characteristic of Jewish humor in Diaspora.
(8.) This may help to explain why public speakers so often begin with a joke (as I did), and also why so many of today's otherwise stodgy politicians seem so willing to make fun of their own personality traits during an election year: being able to laugh about your own faults is apparently supposed to translate into "trust" at the polls.
(9.) Other works, such as the satirical "Haggadah" of Jonah Rapa (written circa 1380), which is a "vehement denunciation of the licentiousness indulged in by Gentiles during Carnival," were written in Hebrew ("Satire," The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 11, 72).
(10.) It should be pointed out, however, that even in Gordin's adaptations of Shakespeare, The Jewish King Lear and Mirele Efros, or The Jewish Queen Lear, something of the carnival spirit embracing all life is evoked, largely through the folk dramatist's "linguistic synchrony" with the diverse speech registers of the Yiddish-speaking community that was his audience, from the rigidity of sacred Hebrew to the contrast between the Yiddish spoken in the cities of Slutzk in "provincial" southern Russia and Grodno in "aristocratic" Lithuania (Waldinger 126-27, 129).
(11.) Or perhaps, given one idea, he chose to express it two ways, tragic and comic, as Shakespeare did with the subject of love mix-ups in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, two plays whose probable dates of composition are rather close to each other. (With typical hyperbole, newspapers from the early 1900s repeatedly refer to Gordin as "the Jewish Shakespeare.")
(12.) Starting with a challenge is a defining characteristic of oral folk humor (often ribald); riddles are essentially challenges. See Vasvari.
(13.) Gordin also considered his works to be "Art," not just instruments of propaganda. This is stated repeatedly in a 1902 interview, in which it is also noted that Gordin had already written "63 plays, some 517 sketches, and he himself does not know how many articles!" (Finkelstein 1-2); the Encyclopaedia Judaica lists "more than 100 plays" ("Jacob Gordin," Vol. 7, 767).
(14.) There is some literary precedent for this phenomenon as well. An anonymous parody ascribed to the sixteenth century takes the form of a "Promissory Note" from God to the Earth, guaranteeing the eventual return of the earth God used in making Adam. The note is dated the Sixth Day of Creation and attested by "Michael, the Angel of Wisdom," "Gabriel, the Angel of Power," and "Metatron, the Chief Secretary." This familiarity with angels was not one that breeds contempt. The Mystics had invented a complete system of angelology and demonology, and claimed to know the functions of every seraph in heaven, and every demon in hell. It is no wonder then, that the parodist shared their knowledge and spoke of angels in terms of intimate friendship. (Davidson 36-37). Thus, this humorist is not actually making fun of heaven, but rather of those who purport to know heaven, and this motif is also operative in Gordin's satire.
(15.) One difference is that much of the comedy in the Lenny Bruce version comes from the fact that they are recognized, and the chaos that this produces.
(16.) DAB Vol. 7, 244-46; Vol. 8, 142-43; Vol. 3, 222-24.
(17.) In the collection of Gordin's short sketches and satires put out by the Hebrew Publishing Company in 1910, a year after Gordin's death, it carries the title, "Yezus Kristus un Karl Marx tsu Gast in Nyu York," but the Jacob Gordin papers in the YIVO Archives include two documents where it appears under the title, "Moyshe Rabeynu, Yezus Kristus un Karl Marx tsu Gast in Nyu York." The documents are a hand-written and a typed list of Gordin's articles and stories, probably compiled by his son, Alexander J. Gordin (Folder 182). Since the Moses episode comes first and is equal to the others in terms of narrative importance, the absence of his name in the published title seems rather bizarre.
(18.) Jesus' name also appears three different ways, as the Hebrew Yeshua, then the Germanic Yezus, and as a transliteration from English, "Dzsheezus Krayst."
(19.) In spite of Gordin's reputation as a champion of the people's Yiddish as a literary language, this edition of his story contains a great many daytshmerisms, for example, the prefixes ob- for op-, be-/ba-, fer-/far-, er-/der-, the spellings of words such as gegen for kegn, geht/geyt, vohnen/voynen, and entire words such as lezen for leyenen, diezer/doziker, etvos/epes, etc. In this article, the spelling has been modernized whenever the original Yiddish is cited.
(20.) This is increasingly common in contemporary translations: cf. Ansky 148, "Gevalt! Catastrophe! Disaster" (Golda Werman, translator), and MoykherSforim, 296, "Oy, tatenyoo, dear Father! Oy vey, woe is me, woe!" (Gerald Stillman, translator)
(21.) An exception would be the character who is described only as an "Irish Catholic," who does not speak a Yiddish meant to represent some of the qualities of English, including the use of transliterated Englishisms, but rather a thoroughly idiomatic Yiddish that is meant to be a complete semantic transfer into Yiddish of the idiomatic English he must have spoken, that cannot be recreated:
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
[Ikh hob zikh geshlogn oyf kulatshkes]
(Gordin, Ale shriftn 200).
I have no way of knowing what the "original" source of this Irishman's English was like, but clearly it would not have had a word like kulatshkes in it. Some syntactic shifting is necessary to make an enjoyable read in English. If the humor is meant to come from the crude contrast between Jesus' somewhat naive concern and the man's overly boisterous reply, then that effect can be reasonably approximated with any number of substitutions. Rather than a relatively close syntactic translation such as, "I was slugging with both fists," I have chosen "We were beating the hell out of each other," that is more representative of spoken English (for a compelling argument for maintaining close syntactic fidelity in translation, see Raffel, especially chapters 1 and 2).
Another issue of orality is present in the printed text, which is full of ellipsis points whose graphic presence appears to be fulfilling the function of stage directions, indicating where dramatic pauses should be placed by whomever is reading the story out loud, a pattern that occurs in many of Gordin's satires. Gordin's major literary output was as a dramatist, but many of his sketches were "so theatrical" that they were given public readings by actors before an audience (Hapgood 212). There are some 100 occurrences of ellipsis points in this short story, and I have eliminated most of them in translation. Commas and periods have much the same weight in modern English.
(22.) For a detailed discussion of this approach, see Larson.
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Kenneth Wishnia is an assistant professor in the English Department at Suffolk Community College. He has written several novels featuring an Ecuadorian American female detective, which have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Anthony Award for crime fiction.
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