Cribside and Other Stories: 2022 Pakn Treger Digital Translation Issue

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