UC Berkeley

My dissertation, Translational Encounters: Modernism, Jewishness and Translation in Literatures of the Mass Migration Period, studies strategies of literary representation developed by early-twentieth-century Jewish immigrant authors in response to pressures of assimilation and language effacement. I triangulate authors who have traditionally been read within different, monolingual literary historiographies: Lamed Shapiro (Yiddish), Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth (American English), and L. A. Arieli (Hebrew). This new historiographical map traces how multilingual authors who wrote in various languages designed in their works strategies of translation to utilize the modernist project’s destabilization of the national language. I argue that in order to make a repressed minor language into a vital agent within a national culture that demanded its effacement, these authors designed an openended narrative oscillation between “original” and “translation.” They designed a new, linguistic paradigm to envision an American self that is always in the making.

My dissertation examines one of the most intricate genres undertaken by Jewish immigrant authors, which I term “the translational novel.” These are works which read as a translation, insofar as the linguistic situation in the fictional world is mediated for the reader by another language. As a result, much of the thematic “drama” in these texts is shifted from the represented world to the very act of its linguistic mediation. A few recent studies investigated this technique in different contexts, e.g. Adriana X. Jacobs’ Strange Cocktail (2018) and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s Born Translated (2015). What seem to have been missing, however, are first, an adequate account of contemporaneous literatures in several languages, and second, a study of this device’s particular response to the modernist crisis of representation. Translational Encounters addresses this lacuna by uncovering the aesthetic potentiality of such translational encounters in narrative form. I consider Jewish immigrant authors’ design of a translational mode of narration (for example, Lamed Shapiro narrates in Yiddish events that take place in English), contending that these authors draw on the place of translation outside the “nameable,” that is the social grammars of meaning and their construction of legible national and linguistic subjects. For these authors, I argue, translational narration is a distinctly modernist technique for responding to a crisis of expression and social fragmentation, a means to participate in modernism’s destabilization of language without giving up linguistic particularity.

The first chapter reaches beyond modernism to explore the vital role of translation in the American Yiddish theater’s audacious reworkings of Shakespeare, under the parodic dictum, as the legend has it, “translated and improved.” It also studies the afterlife of this late-nineteenth-century practice, by examining works by Anzia Yezierska and Grace Paley. Specifically, I look at various works which Judaize, Yiddishize and queer Shakespearean characters in order to subvert the notion of a national literary inheritance. These works, I suggest, employ translation as a means to envision non-reproductive modes of familial and literary kinship. Finally, the chapter also includes an analysis of “Shakespeare The Second” (Shekspir der tsveyter 1920) by the prolific Yiddish shund playwright Hershel Kalmanowitz, a play which I discovered in a full manuscript form in the American Jewish Archives, and which has not been studied before. Turning to explicit engagements with modernist style, the next chapters examine works in three languages. In my second chapter, I explore a literary debate between two American Yiddish authors – Lamed Shapiro (1878-1948) and Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971) – regarding James Joyce’s technique of stream of consciousness. I show that American Yiddish authors resolved their contested ideas about Jewishness by projecting them onto their ideas on Joycean abstraction of time, interiority and language. I argue that Shapiro utilizes the encounter between the Yiddish language and the American locale to complicate the modernist “universalist” turn inward. His translational representation of a Yiddish-inflected consciousness is attuned to both linguistic particularity and multilingual potentiality.

Whereas my first two chapters study attempts to place Yiddish vis a vis a presumed universal literature, my third chapter turns to Anzia Yezierska’s design of an aesthetic language that is distinctly American. Specifically, I study All I Could Never Be (1932), a novel which is a fictionalized account of Yezierska’s work as a translator with the Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in his 1918 ethnographic study of Polish immigrants. As I show, Yezierska designs a novel that reads as both an original and a translation, tracing in the oscillation between the two a means to effect Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of a fluid American self. In shaping an incessant motion between source and target languages, the novel undoes a unidirectional idea of origin, stressing how each new translation changes the original. While Yezierska unsettles English to advance cultural pluralism, the Hebrew author L. A. Arieli posits that psychic tensions of acculturation can be elucidated only through a non-vernacular minor language. My fourth chapter considers Arieli’s Hebrew novel Diary of a Lonely Man, or How I Became an Anti-Semite (1928), focusing on the crucial role of language in thematizing psychic tensions of ethnic passing. Arieli depicts a second-generation Eastern-European Jewish immigrant who can “pass” as a descendent of Irish (rather than Jewish) immigrants through acculturated speech. Yet although the events take place in English, Arieli narrates them in Hebrew, in order to thematize the pathological effect of ethnic prejudice. Arieli parodically mimics a dated, rabbinic Hebrew register, in order to reveal his protagonist’s view of the Jewish body as a Hebrew liturgical text – a “shameful” obsolete residue whose cultural Otherness raises endless exegetic investigations by the Anglo-dominated surroundings.

In my concluding chapter, I look at Henry Roth’s belated attempt to revisit the decayed Yiddish world of his childhood in his English writing. I show that Roth forms a distinct post-Joycean temporal and linguistic aesthetics that does not retreat from “history” but rather seeks to convey the historical decay of the Yiddish world of his childhood without accepting it under the determinism of a historical “fate.” Specifically, he incorporates numerous manuscripts and diaries into the finished work. This manuscript temporality, I argue, harbors a liberating hesitative time of authorial revision, before past events crystalize on the page into a “fated” death of Yiddish. Similarly, Roth employs Yiddish words as speculative agents that could disrupt the features and boundaries of monolingual American literature in the present.

In studying the intersection of translation, aesthetic form, and ideas on migration and citizenship, my project not only recovers a poetics whose political implications resonate in our own time. It also offers a new, transnational historiography of modernist, American, and modern Jewish literatures alike. By triangulating Hebrew, Yiddish, and American literary works that have not yet been put in substantial conversation, I invite us to rethink what (multilingual) Jewish (as well as American) literature is and the ways in which its historiography should be conceived.