A few days ago I received an E Mail listing all book length translations of works from Yiddish into English. I was very glad to find a Kindle edition of short stories set in Czarist Bialystock. I must
confess the image below flashed in my mind, from the very much in the tradition of the Yiddish
theatre movie from Mel Brooks, The Producers of Lee Meridith demonstrating to Zero Mostel and
Gene Wilder how elegantly she could answer their future office phone with a sultry “Bialystock and Bloom”
Tales of Bialystock - A Jewish Journey from Czarist Russia by Charles Zacharia Goldberg is a delighful collection of stories based on the author’s experiences before he escaped from the city of that name in North Eastern Poland in 1906 at age twenty, taking a steam ship from Hamburg to NYC. He was born in Bialystock in 1886 and died in NYC in 1954.
His daughter, the translator, tells a very interesting story about how these stories came to be first written in Yiddish roughly between 1930 and 1950. She tells us her father, not a highly educated man, began to submit brief stories to Yiddish language Newspapers in New York City. The stories were about the lives of Jewish people in Czarist Bialystock
often focusing on their conflicts with Christians. ( There is a vivid story about Jews organising to fight Cossacks in an anticipated program. The narrator hid in the stair well while a Cossack, on his horse, ransacked his house.) He kept his stories in a notebook. When he died the translator’s mother kept the notebook, her daughter found it when her mother died in 1982. For about thirty years Phyllis kept the notebook, she could understand spoken Yiddish but not read it. She wanted to share these stories so she learned to read Yiddish and published this delightful collection of stories. Some of the stories were based on Goldberg’s experience, other on things other Yiddish immigrants had told him.
In one of the stories, I have not yet read them all, “Stealing Across The Border” we follow along as a young man makes very difficult decision to go to America. His brother was in NYC and his cousin in California and they sent him fare money. There is a system for getting to the port City of Hamburg.
There are twenty three stories in the collection and a Cultural survey of Bialystock by a noted historian, I. Shmulewitz.
This collection is very fairly priced at $3.95 as a Kindle. It is a valuable edition to translated Yiddish short stories. I will read all the stories and hopefully post on a few more of them.
Mel u
Tales of Bialystock - A Jewish Journey from Czarist Russia by Charles Zacharia Goldberg is a delighful collection of stories based on the author’s experiences before he escaped from the city of that name in North Eastern Poland in 1906 at age twenty, taking a steam ship from Hamburg to NYC. He was born in Bialystock in 1886 and died in NYC in 1954.
His daughter, the translator, tells a very interesting story about how these stories came to be first written in Yiddish roughly between 1930 and 1950. She tells us her father, not a highly educated man, began to submit brief stories to Yiddish language Newspapers in New York City. The stories were about the lives of Jewish people in Czarist Bialystock
often focusing on their conflicts with Christians. ( There is a vivid story about Jews organising to fight Cossacks in an anticipated program. The narrator hid in the stair well while a Cossack, on his horse, ransacked his house.) He kept his stories in a notebook. When he died the translator’s mother kept the notebook, her daughter found it when her mother died in 1982. For about thirty years Phyllis kept the notebook, she could understand spoken Yiddish but not read it. She wanted to share these stories so she learned to read Yiddish and published this delightful collection of stories. Some of the stories were based on Goldberg’s experience, other on things other Yiddish immigrants had told him.
In one of the stories, I have not yet read them all, “Stealing Across The Border” we follow along as a young man makes very difficult decision to go to America. His brother was in NYC and his cousin in California and they sent him fare money. There is a system for getting to the port City of Hamburg.
There are twenty three stories in the collection and a Cultural survey of Bialystock by a noted historian, I. Shmulewitz.
This collection is very fairly priced at $3.95 as a Kindle. It is a valuable edition to translated Yiddish short stories. I will read all the stories and hopefully post on a few more of them.
Mel u
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