“Ingathering of Exiles” by Yenta Mash. - 1993 - translated from Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy

Ingathering of Exiles can be read on Words Without Borders

“Ingathering of Exiles” by Yenta Mash. - 1993  - translated from Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy

1922 born Zguiritse, Moldova

1977 immigrated to Israel

2013 dies Haifa, Israel

She begins to write upon Immigration 

Set in Haifa, Israel, “Ingathering of Exiles” is a potrait of a street and the people who live and have shops there.  It is not the fanciest street in Haifa but it just might be the most interesting.   I loved the stories of the different merchants.  Here is a sample of this marvelous story.  

“don’t know about other cities, but in Haifa the street called Kibbutz Galuyot—Ingathering of Exiles—is definitely worthy of the name. Other cities may have bestowed the name when the street was still under construction, without knowing whether it would turn out to be a good fit. In Haifa, though, the street was already in its glory when it got its name. If they’d called it Kibbutz Olamot—Ingathering for Eternity—that wouldn’t have been wrong either. The street must date back to the Ten Commandments, maybe even back to the Creation. Certainly it’s as chaotic as the dawn of time—a bedlam of languages from all corners of the earth. People quarrel in Hebrew to get a point across; they fling insults in Russian to show how important they are; and to pull out all the stops they curse in Yiddish. Sometimes a few punches are even thrown, but by now the scrappiest old fighters have passed on, and these days people don’t want to get their hands dirty. When a skirmish breaks out, most of the time the police don’t even hear about it; the parties patch it up among themselves and move on.”

This story now is among sixteen Short stories by Mesh translated by Ellen Cassedy and published in a collection entitled On The Landing.  I hope to read all these stories.  There is an additional story of Mesh on line courtesy The Yiddish Book Center and I next post on that.

Ellen Cassedy, the author of We Are Here, is a frequent speaker about the Holocaust, Lithuania, and Jewish culture.  Her book began when she set out to connect with her Jewish family roots.  In a searing terrain of memory and moral dilemmas, she explored how people in Lithuania – Jews and non-Jews alike – are engaging with their Nazi and Soviet past.  In the end, she found hope for a more tolerant future.

We Are Here is the winner of numerous awards and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

Ellen’s Tips for Writers appear monthly on SheWrites.com.

Her play, Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn, celebrates the spare beauty of a small but important life. Based on the diary of an actual elderly woman, it was adapted into a short film that won numerous awards and qualified for an Academy Award nomination.

Ellen was awarded the 2012 Translation Prize by the  Yiddish Book Center with her colleague, Yermiyahu Aaron Taub.  Her translations appear in the magazine of the Yiddish Book Center and in Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories (Warner Books).

Ellen is a former columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, a former speechwriter in the Clinton Administration, and the author of two books for working women. Her work has appeared in Hadassah, The Jewish Daily Forward, the Huffington Post, Ha’aretz, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Lilith, Bridges, Polin, and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.

...from Ellencassedy.com

Yenta Mash (1922–2013) grew up in the region once known as Bessarabia (present-day Moldova), renowned as a lively polyglot area and a flourishing center of Jewish culture. In 1941, she was exiled to the Siberian gulag by Soviet forces. She endured seven years of hard labor before leaving the prison camp and making her way to Chisinau, then the capital of the Moldavian SSR. In 1977, in her fifties, Mash immigrated to Israel and settled in Haifa, where, she began to write and to publish. Her short stories were published in Yiddish journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and her work was collected in four volumes published in Israel. She was honored with Israel’s Itsik Manger Prize in 1999 and with the Dovid Hofshteyn Prize in 2002...from Words Without Borders

From “Kibbutz Galuyot” in Meshane mokem (A Change of Place). © 1993 Yenta Mash. By arrangement with the author’s estate. Translation © Ellen Cassedy.