THE YIDDISHISTS

OUR SERIES DELVES INTO THE TREASURES OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST YIDDISH ARCHIVE AT YIVO INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH RESEARCH

From top: Illustration from Kleyne Mentshelekh (Tiny Little People), a Yiddish adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels published in Poland, 1925. The caption reads, “With great effort I liberated my left hand.”; cover page for Kleyne Mentshelekh

Manger was not the only 20th-century Yiddish-speaking Jew to take an interest in Swift’s 18th-century works. Between 1907 and 1939, there were at least five Yiddish translations and adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels published in the United States, Poland and Russia. One such edition, published in 1925 by Farlag Yudish, a publishing house that specialised in Yiddish translations of literary classics, appeared in their Kinder-bibliotek (Children’s Library) series alongside other beloved books such as Harriet Beecher GULLIVER IN YIDDISHLAND Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Edith Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle and fairytales by the Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett were just some brothers Grimm. Literature and journals THE YIDDISHISTS of the Anglo-Irish and Irish writers whose work was translated and for children and youth, both those written specifically in Yiddish and those translated adapted by 20th-century Yiddishists, says Stefanie Halpern into the language, were a lucrative branch of Yiddish publishing in the interwar n his 1942 poem ‘A Song of the Dean of Stella’s golden brooch, a reference to ‘A period. Such material became especially Jonathan Swift and the Yiddish Journal to Stella’, Swift’s 1766 work based important with the establishment of a IRhyme-maker Itzik Manger’, the poet on letters he sent to his real-life lover Yiddish secular school network across and playwright Itzik Manger imagines a Esther Johnson. Another gift, Vanessa’s Europe, whose goal was to teach a varied nighttime visit from the Anglo-Irish writer tears, alludes to his poem ‘Cadenus and curriculum of mathematics, sciences, Jonathan Swift, who was made Dean of St Vanessa’, which was about another of his politics, history, and literature, using Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in 1713. lovers, Esther Vanhomrigh. Yiddish as the language of instruction. The two talk as old friends, eating, Manger was born in Czernowitz, These translations of Swift’s most drinking, smoking and gossiping. Manger Bucovina. His family moved to Jassy in famous work were also part of a fills the poem with allusions to some Romania and he then spent ten years proliferation of translations of world of Swift’s best-known works: The Dean steeped in the Yiddish literary circle in literature into Yiddish, including finds himself stranded after missing the Warsaw, Poland. As a Romanian national, everything from Sophocles and Plato to train for Lilliput, an obvious reference to Manger was forced from Poland in 1938 Homer, Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Gulliver’s Travels. As he sits beside Manger, and sought refuge in France. However, Zola, Dickens and Whitman. Dean Swift chews on the mustard-dipped when the Germans occupied France in Swift certainly wasn’t the only Irish leg of a child, a not-so-subtle nod to ‘A 1940, he fled to London, where he went writer who found himself translated into Modest Proposal’, Swift’s 1729 satirical on to immerse himself Yiddish: Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, essay attacking the in English classical and even the Irish folktales of Seumas British government’s literature and poetry. MacManus found favour among Yiddish handling of poverty in Though he eventually audiences. This vast body of literature in Ireland, in which he became a British translation made it possible for Yiddish suggests that the key to citizen, he loathed the readers to encounter classics in their own solving the economic decade he spent in language and through their own cultural crisis is for the Irish to England. His poem can lens, just as Itzik Manger was able to share eat their children. be read as the exiled hamentashn and toast “L’chaim” with his Manger and Swift Yiddish writer’s good friend, Jonathan Swift. n speak of the marriage attempt to process of their old friend, the Swift’s works and the See yivo.org. Read about Jewish Ireland in our Devil. The Dean proposes culture from which special section on p14. Stefanie Halpern is the

sending the couple a gift they derive. director of the YIVO Archives. JEWISH RESEARCH FOR INSTITUTE FROM THE ARCHIVES OF YIVO

44 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK APRIL 2021