Examines how Jewish writers who translated their own works between Hebrew and Yiddish challenged fundamental assumptions about originality and national identity.
What happens when the same author writes the same work in two different languages? Translating the Self explores this question through the lens of Hebrew-Yiddish literary self-translation, revealing how this practice became a flashpoint for debates about Jewish national culture, identity, and the nature of literary originality itself. Spanning modern Jewish literature from the late nineteenth century to today, this book examines four major writers—Aharon Reuveni, Hirsh Dovid Nomberg, Zalman Shneour, and Avot Yeshurun—who navigated the complex terrain between Hebrew and Yiddish through innovative acts of self-translation. As Jewish nationalism increasingly demanded monolingual practices, these writers developed creative strategies to maintain bilingual literary practices while confronting fundamental questions: What constitutes an "original" work? How do languages shape national identity? Can a writer inhabit multiple linguistic worlds? Through close readings and archival research, Translating the Self demonstrates how self-translation offers a unique window into the formation of modern Jewish subjectivity and the ongoing negotiation between literary creativity and national belonging.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Original Translations, and Vice Versa
1. The Façade of Hebraism: Aharon Reuveni and the Search for Monolingualism
2. Translating Travels: from Yiddishland to Hebrewland with H. D. Nomberg
3. Languages of Nostalgia: Shneour Invents the Shtetl
4. Translating the Mother and Her Tongue: Avot Yeshurun Translating Yiddish Letters into Hebrew Poetry
Conclusion: The Afterlife of Self-Translation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Yaakov Herskovitz is Assistant Professor of Eastern European Jewish Studies and Sarah and E. J. Evans Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of "And in It the Mother's Letter": Memory and the Epistolary Art of Forgetting in the Poetry of Avot Yeshurun.
Review :
"This an important contribution to the fields of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, as well as to the relatively understudied topic of self-translation in Jewish literature. Focusing on a unique multilingual moment in modern Jewish history, it sheds light on often ignored aspects of literary history and brings attention to crucial texts that have been marginalized in the study of Hebrew literature but deserve more attention." — Melissa Weininger, author of Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century
