Fear and Desires: Two Women, Two Yiddish Authors, Two Translations

More  Yiddish prose works by women have been translated in the last twenty  years than in the previous century. Why? How have these translations  changed our understanding of Yiddish literature? How has translation  changed? This talk will examine these questions and more by focusing on  two recent translations: Chana Blankshteyn’s short stories, Fear, and Tsilye Dropkin’s novel, Desires (both translated by Anita Norich). Blankshteyn,  largely unknown now but an important writer and activist in her own  day, published her collection of stories in July 1939 in Vilna. Dropkin,  living in New York and well-known poet but not as a novelist,  serialized her novel in the Forverts in 1934.

Bio: Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.  She is the translator of Desires by Tsilye Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), and numerous short stories. She is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; and The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer.  She  translates Yiddish literature and lectures and publishes on a range of  topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and  literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.