Sholem Aleichem and His Legacy

Sholem Aleichem, whose 150th anniversary was commemorated in March 2009, remains one of the most popular Yiddish authors. But few people today are able to read the original. Since the 1910s, however, Sholem Aleichem's works have been known to a wider international audience through numerous translations, and through film and theatre adaptations, most famously Fiddler on the Roof.

European Translations and Contexts

This volume examines those translations published in Europe, with the aim of investigating how the specific European contexts might have shaped translations of Yiddish literature.

Contributions

Olga Litvak - Found in Translation: Sholem Aleichem and the Myth of the Ideal Yiddish Reader

Alexander Frenkel - Sholem Aleichem as a Self-Translator

Eugenia Prokop-Janiec - Sholem Aleichem and the Polish-Jewish Literary Audience

Gennady Estraikh - Soviet Sholem Aleichem

Roland Gruschka - 'Du host zikh a denkmol af eybik geshtelt': The Sovietization and Heroization of Sholem Aleichem in the 1939 Jubilee Poems

Mikhail Krutikov - A Man for All Seasons: Translating Sholem Aleichem into Soviet Ideological Idiom

Gabriella Safran - Four English Pots and the Evolving Translatability of Sholem Aleichem

Sabine Koller - On (Un)Translatability: Sholem Aleichem's Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories) in German Translation

Alexandra Hoffman - Laughing Matters: Translation and Irony in Der gliklekhster in Kodne

Kerstin Hoge - Lost in Marienbad: On the Literary Use of the Linguistic Openness of Yiddish

Anna Verschik - Sholem Aleichem in Estonian: Creating a Tradition

Jan Schwarz - Speaking Tevye der milkhiker in Translation: Performance, Humour, and World Literature