Rose Waldman
Photo courtesy of Rose Waldman
Bio
Rose Waldman holds an MFA in Fiction and Literary Translation from Columbia University. A native Yiddish speaker, she is the translator of S. An-sky’s Yiddish novel, Pioneers: The First Breach, published by Syracuse University Press, and I. L. Peretz’s Married, published by Back Pages Books. Her translation of a Chaim Grade novel, The Rabbi’s House, is forthcoming from Knopf Doubleday. She was a recipient of a translation fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center in 2014 and 2016. Currently, she teaches Writing at NYU Liberal Studies.
Discovering a Yiddish novel I hadn’t known about is always a thrill, but sometimes I find it hard to get into the story. Not so with Ringn Oyf Der Neshome (Rings on the Soul). The moment I started reading it, I was captivated. Stylistically, the novel is a beauty. It’s written in a mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness voice with long Proustian sentences that stretch on breathlessly. Each time I came to the end of the page, I found myself hungry for the next. And it wasn’t just the gorgeous prose. The story itself is historically fascinating and important—half a century of Jewish life under Soviet rule encapsulated in a novel and written by someone who’d personally experienced it. I don’t know of another Yiddish novel that covers this material.
For these reasons, I was dying to translate the book. But I kept wavering. The stream-of-consciousness style, the subject matter, and the necessary knowledge of Soviet history required to understand how to translate various parts of the novel made this work a real challenge for a translator. Honestly, despite my love for the book, I could not justify undertaking this project without some promise of compensation.
Enter the phone call from the National Endowment for the Arts, promising me exactly that! I am grateful beyond words. Without this essential means of support, I could not produce this translation.
The grant provides validation to me as a translator, it honors Yiddish, and it shows regard for quality literature and the work of a wonderful, fairly unknown writer. Thank you.
from Rings on the Soul by Eli Shechtman
[Translated from the Yiddish]
He traveled then, thirteen-year-old Pinkhes, gazing over the wagon’s rail into the distance, looking out for a redeemer, and was unaware that an inky-red shadow was escorting the creaking wagon over the twilight forest, where trees in the flame of autumn already stood knee deep in their own leaves. He, Pinkhes, who five years later would become an ardent Bolshevik and raise his hand against the Kaiser—he had not only a social reckoning with the Kaiser, but also an ethnic one: for the Jewish ghetto, for the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” for the university quotas for Jews, for the pogroms, for the Beilis process.
And he, Pinkhes the locksmith, would later, with Lenin’s name on his lips, under Lenin’s flag, join the October Revolution in full force, fight for a workers’ provincial government, for freedom and friendship between nations, with rifle in hand he’d fight against all the enemies of the global revolution. And afterwards, years later, on that August night, they would come and seize him, wrest him away from his wife and child, tear him from his life, and exile him to Buchta Nagayevo, in the North, in the eternal white freeze, and from there drive him farther away, transport him to an island entirely cut off from the living world, and lock him up in the prison where the worst “enemies of the nation” were held, where twice a day they were given over-salted fish and once in twenty-four hours, a drink of water. But even there, on the island, surrounded by sea and frost and squalls, where the barred windows were also covered with visors, for God forbid that a ray of cold sun enters the room, or a spark of the frozen-over moon; even there, with flayed skin and broken bones (only in his black eyes did the fire of his soul still burn, that holy fire of his grandfathers and great-grandfathers who, with heads held high, had sacrificed themselves in the name of God), even there, in that prison on the island, with no strength left, wounded and pained, they were unable to break him: he would not give a single false signature, would not allow himself to serve as a “witness,” become a slanderer and informer. So they did not wait for him, Pinkhes son of Meir, son of Aryeh the Kohen, to die naturally. They shot him—he, the strong believer in the “Torah of Lenin.” And no one knows where his twisted, broken bones lie.
About Eli Shechtman
Eli Shechtman was born in a Polesian village in Ukraine in 1908. In post-Holocaust Soviet Union, when it seemed Stalin had succeeded in severing Soviet Jews from their millennial-old traditions, Shechtman stunned the world by publishing Erev (On the Eve), a Yiddish novel with epic scope, rich language, and profound nostalgia for traditional Judaism. In 1981, he published his last novel, Rings on the Soul, an elegiac autobiographical story. Shechtman was the recipient of the Itsik Manger prize, the Chaim Zhitlowsky prize, the Fernando Jeno Award, and the Congress of Jewish Culture Award.