Cribside and Other Stories: 2022 Pakn Treger Digital Translation Issue
By Pakn Treger
()
About this ebook
Read more from Pakn Treger
2016 Pakn Treger Translation Issue: An Anthology of Newly Translated Yiddish Works Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPakn Treger 2021 Digital Translation Issue: Yiddish in Nature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings2017 Pakn Treger Translation Issue: A Collection of Newly Translated Yiddish Works By Women Writers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings2020 Pakn Treger Translation Issue: Yiddish Comes to America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Cribside and Other Stories
Related ebooks
Bard, Kinetic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGuesthouse for Ganesha: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Best Canadian Poetry 2021 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Will Not Bear You Sons Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoetry Book Society Spring 2022 Bulletin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIt's time to disobedy... Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBerji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Poetry Book Society Winter 2019 Bulletin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChapter & Verse - James Joyce Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll That Divides Us: Poems Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5In the Heat of Shadows: South African Poetry 1996-2013 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Essential Ruth Stone Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPrayers for the Living: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLight and Legacies: Stories of Black Girlhood and Liberation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsProblems of Translation, or Charlie's Comic, Terrifying, Romantic, Loopy Round-the-World Journey in Search of Linguistic Happiness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAsylum: Well Met Istanbul, Well Met Londra Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYellow Tree Alone: Selected Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Witch Bottle & Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Real Name is Hanna Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJoyful Orphan: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsProdigal Children in the House of G-d Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLoss of Memory Is Only Temporary Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems (1997-2022) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLetters to My Oldest Friend Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLost and Certain of It Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJerusalem as a Second Language Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Anthologies For You
Kink: Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Kama Sutra (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5First Spanish Reader: A Beginner's Dual-Language Book Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ariel: The Restored Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Great Short Stories: Selections from Poe, London, Twain, Melville, Kipling, Dickens, Joyce and many more Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Anonymous Sex Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Harvard Classics Volume 1: Franklin, Woolman, Penn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Writing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Faking a Murderer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult: Hidden Magic, Occult Truths, and the Stories That Started It All Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Celtic Tales: Fairy Tales and Stories of Enchantment from Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, and Wales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spanish Stories/Cuentos Espanoles: A Dual-Language Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best Horror of the Year Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mark Twain: Complete Works Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Cleaning the Gold: A Jack Reacher and Will Trent Short Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Creepypasta Collection: Modern Urban Legends You Can't Unread Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/550 Great Love Letters You Have To Read (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Galaxy's Isaac Asimov Collection Volume 1: A Compilation from Galaxy Science Fiction Issues Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Best American Short Stories 2017 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Take Us to a Better Place: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Humorous American Short Stories: Selections from Mark Twain, O. Henry, James Thurber, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and more Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Paradise Lost (Annotated) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Cribside and Other Stories
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Cribside and Other Stories - Pakn Treger
Introduction
I am an acrobat,
and I dance between daggers
erected in the ring
tips up.
Celia Dropkin’s poem Di tsirkus-dame
represents the experience of women who create art like acrobats dancing among erect and sharpened blades. An audience of men—like the male critics whose sharp pens and tongues dissected Dropkin’s own poetry—watch the balancing act with a mixture of violent and erotic expectation. Will they applaud if she manages to complete her performance skillfully, eluding death-by-falling,
or will they be more satisfied to watch her fail? Dropkin’s poem ends with an acrobatically shocking twist:
I’m tired of dancing between you,
cold steel daggers.
I want—my blood warming
your bare tips—to fall.
(translation by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon)
It is this surprising end that makes the poem a masterpiece of Yiddish literature. Dropkin captures not only the experience of the woman artist in a male-dominated literary world—always on display, always sexualized, always the object of a sometimes violent male gaze—but also the woman’s exhausted wish, even if only for a moment, to give in, to give up, to let the daggers penetrate. This dark ending lifts the poem from simple metaphor—women as ballerinas existing for the pleasure of the male viewer—into the complicated and conflicted interior experience of the woman artist herself.
It is perhaps not coincidence that Lili Berger used almost the same imagery in her story At the Interrogation,
one of the fourteen stories, poems, and memoirs included in this anthology of new translations from Yiddish about women’s experiences. In Berger’s story, translated by Judy Nisenholt, a Yiddish woman writer in Poland in 1961 endures a daylong interrogation by a government official whose hands looked as if they were constantly ready for a fight
: Lena bit her tongue. She had stepped onto a slippery slope. Her husband had cautioned her. She rallied her remaining strength. She must be careful, retain her equilibrium like an acrobat, stepping along a wire in midair.
Like Dropkin’s acrobat, Berger’s protagonist, by the end of the day, longs to end her ordeal by signing the incriminating testimony the official puts before her—to give in to the threat of violence against her and her family lurking under the surface of the interrogation.
Each new translation in this issue invites us to enter and consider similarly fraught experiences of women: mothers weighing whether to leave their children alone for the sake of work or political commitments; women partisans risking their lives in the struggle against fascism; the challenges of upholding Yiddishkeit and tsnies in a modernizing world; daughters attempting to understand their mothers as women with lives of their own.
In 2017 we marked a commitment to listen to and raise up women’s voices with that year’s Pakn Treger Translation Issue. In the five years since, the work of countless individuals has borne fruit in translation, scholarship, and art of many genres celebrating the work and lives of Yiddish-speaking women. Some of this work has been ongoing for decades; some is clearly the result of a broader cultural moment. This year’s Pakn Treger Translation Issue gives an opportunity to sample some of the excellent work happening in Yiddish literary translation. You can explore much more through the full scope of the Yiddish Book Center’s Decade of Discovery: Women in Yiddish.
In the introduction to her translation of Rokhl Kramf’s poem To Rosa Palatnik,
Abigail Weaver writes: This poem makes me feel that there is another golden chain, or maybe a silver one, to use the color mentioned in the poem, that links woman writers together—in love, in sisterhood, in mentorship, in sorrow, in shared striving to carry on the literary legacy of our mother’s mothers … and I hope my translation links me to them as well.
On behalf of the translators, editors, and all who helped create this anthology, we invite you to join this goldene (oder zil-berne!) keyt by reading these works with us. —Madeleine Cohen
Two Diaper Poems
By Ida Maze, translated by Ri J. Turner
The following pair of poems comes from Ida Maze’s collection Vaksn mayne kinderlekh: Muter un kinder-lider (And My Children Grow: Mother and Child Poems, 1954), which won the Congress for Jewish Culture’s prize for children’s literature in 1955. As is clear from the collection’s title, Maze often wrote about motherhood, including quotidian, intimate acts that were not likely to be considered serious
poetic themes by the male-dominated literary establishment. Here Maze offers a poem and its sequel on washing cloth diapers (an activity also referenced, by the way, by Yiddish poets Kadya Molodowsky and Roshelle Weprinsky): first from the perspective of a mother, then from that of a grandmother.
I. I Wash My Child’s Diapers
I wash my child’s diapers
In the creek in the woods;
My child, my babe will grow up
Healthy, wealthy, good.
The creek is full of wavelets,
They murmur, race, and spray;
One of baby’s diapers
Swims with them away.
O bear, ye tiny wavelets,
The diaper with my thanks,
To the place where a needy mama
Washes diapers by the banks.
She will catch the diaper
Which swam away from me
To use it for her darling—
And a blessing may it be!
II. Again I’m Washing Diaper Cloths
Again I’m washing diaper cloths
For tiny lovely toddling tots;
Again, my heart, it sings a song,
This old heart will yet live long.
And little eyes call out again
Like birds in flight in early spring;
My song pursues them, light and airy,
This old heart is not yet weary.
My child—and then my child’s child,
Hard the road, and wondrous wild;
Again I’m washing diaper cloths
For tiny lovely toddling tots.
Translator’s Acknowledgments: Thank you to the poet’s son, Irving (Yosl) Massey, for his permission to publish these translations.
Cribside: A Dramatization of Life in Politics
By Yenta Serdatsky, translated by Jessica Kirzane
Cribside
is a short dramatization by Yenta Serdatsky (1877–1962) that appeared in Yiddish in her collected works in 1913. In the scene a young mother involved in political activism becomes isolated because of her motherhood duties. Serdatsky draws attention to the limits of revolutionary politics that fail to take into account the realities of women’s lives and obligations.
Characters:
MARCUS: A handsome brown-haired 25-year-old political activist
HELENA: marcus’s wife, a few years younger
BABY: Their daughter, 6 months old
MANIA: A young blonde woman
The setting is a small square room with an iron crib against one wall, a couch against the other. A small table sits against the only window, with two chairs on either side. There is a set of shelves, a baby carriage, and other small items. It is evening. A white glass lamp lights the room.
HELENA, dressed in a brightly colored house dress, sits at the table. An open book sits in front of her, but she isn’t reading. She glances anxiously at the clock.
HELENA It’s getting late and he’s not here yet. (She stands and looks impatiently at the