Further Notes on languages, translations,
and mapping
Isabelle Rozenbaumas
Moishe Rozenbaumas passed away on November 1st 2016. At the time, Jonathan Layton had already translated the French book and we had begun to entertain the idea of an English edition.
Languages
Not unlike Moishe himself, this Odyssey Of An Apple Thief traveled a long way, going back and forth many times, first from Yiddish to French, now from French to English, always leaning soundly on the original Yiddish manuscript, and, for this version, on Moishe's own Yiddish-language recording of his text. During the translation process, the French translator, now the editor of this English version, was always accompanied by the author: in person while she established the French version published by La Cause des Livres in 2004, he was literally sitting at her side and by recordings of his voice, which she listened to while revising the version now being published by Syracuse University Press, worried that anything added in the French version might be omitted.
While Moishe’s narrative bristles with Yiddish names, Yiddish and Hebrew concepts, Russian vocabulary, we are surprised not to find almost a single Lithuanian word. This fact in itself speaks to the invisible barrier separating the Jewish working youth from the ethnic Lithuanian population. The Jews had “only” been in the country for the past seven hundred years. Moishe’s grandparents on his mother’s side lived in Gargždai (Gorzd), one of the oldest Jewish community attested in the archival sources as far back as the 16th century. Multilingualism was a hallmark of Jewish life in this corner of Lithuania. The author’s mother Mere-Khaye, a simple woman, could read and speak German, speak Lithuanian with her neighbors, used Yiddish as her vernacular and could probably read and write it, and prayed in Hebrew. From this shtetl, which Sholem Aleichem might have described as “large as a yawn”, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington owns a photo of a “Group portrait of an Esperanto class in Gargzdai, Lithuania”, dated 1940.
Instead of one final glossary accounting for this polyglossia, it made more sense to import this multilingual corpus into the text itself, translating in apposition, polishing it, paraphrasing and adding a footnote only when a notion needs more context, because this juxtaposition was in the logic of the author’s writing itself, and embedded in his oral culture. This very method of commenting on words from different languages had also been part of the process of elaboration of the French version when my father and I sat together trying to figure out how to match his original Yiddish text, my understanding of it, and his own French translation in what I have called tate-loshn. His answers to my questions contributed amending and enriching the narrative. Indeed, each leg on this journey has been a very Jewish mode of expending a text by adding levels of exegesis and commentaries.
Names, romanization and pronunciation of Yiddish
For reasons he explains himself in his short introduction, Moishe has preferred not to name most of the persons he is remembering, tinting his narrative with a more collective quality, and conferring on his testimony a historical or sometimes sociological character. The Yiddish names of the members of our family are rendered in the Yiddish inflection they were pronounced with and written by my parents, and more precisely the way my father has transcribed them in his French auto-translation and in the forms he conveyed to Yad Vashem. In general, but even more for Moishe’s first name, I tried to maintain coherence between the French and the English translation, so as to avoid the same Yiddish name having a different romanization in each language.
For most Yiddish words, I have adopted the standard YIVO transliteration as in khasene, khokhme and kneydlekh. I refrained from adding footnotes of the sort: kneydlekh: matzoh balls. Only for words which are widely used in English (e.g. challah, chutzpah) have we adopted the usual American spelling. For Russian words, I transliterated them according to the Library of Congress system for Cyrillic alphabet.
It has been suggested to me to transcribe names and words according to their pronunciation in the Lithuanian Yiddish dialect, which covers a geographical zone much larger than the borders of present day Lithuania (see Map 1), including parts of (Northern) Belorussia as well as Russia. Over the years, I noticed that Yiddish-speaking families sometimes reproduce characteristics of their vernacular from a town or from a religious background like hassidic where the loshn kodesh, the Hebrew component of Yiddish, can expand so much as to become opaque to a secular speaker. Other will use daytshmerizm (germanization), revealing a more intellectual or assimilated Jewish milieu. Then, the Yiddish language is more or less tinted with/influenced by the language of the country. Moishe whose father’s family was from Warsaw had a very distinctive – not to say idiosyncratic – difficulty to differentiate the sounds s from the z, sh or the g/j, possibly characteristic of Lithuanian Yiddish. His wife Rosa, born and raised in Samogitia (Žemaitija), the Western region of Lithuania, didn’t speak exactly the same yiddish. On the tapes recorded by Moishe, I was able to perceive some very fine distinctions I never noticed before in conversation, like the sound “oeil” (in French) instead of the [ey] for [oy] in the words like broyt, aroys, farkoyfn, which appears to be a feature of this region’s Yiddish. Regional differences inside Lithuania must have been very subtle, almost imperceptible if not to linguists, not to mention the existence of familiolects, a specific accent or expression shared by a family. While striking a speaker of Polish or Ukrainian Yiddish as different from his own vernacular, it needs a trained ear to distinguish Litvish from standard Yiddish. To translate phonetically these minuscule inflections would require a strong literary or ethnographic goal. Therefore, it is preferable to stick to standard Yiddish and to give access to Moishe’s recordings of the whole initial manuscript in his consistent Litvish Yiddish to anyone interested in dialectology.
Mapping and contextualizing
The map that was presented in the French edition was the result of the common work of Moishe with his granddaughter Eléonore Biezunski, then a student in geography. My father explained to us that he had drawn his itinerary through Europe and Asia with his pattern designer needle point tracer on the map she had prepared for him. The task of remapping the Odyssey of Moishe finally fell on the geographer and cartographer Jacques Enaudeau who provides three maps : “The Lithuanian Territory on the Eve of WWII”, which presents the names of the towns and cities in their Yiddish transliteration as well as in the language of their then national space, “The 7,000 miles of Moishe’s Odyssey” , and “The War and the Holocaust on the Eastern Front (1941-1945)”. A number of historical notes have been added that didn’t seem necessary almost twenty years ago because the readers might have been more familiar with certain aspects of history at this time.
As stated in Yitskhok Niborski’s preface to the French edition, the original Yiddish text was written by Moishe in a beautiful Yiddish. This book is also a tool to understand the Yiddish culture and history of this “ Ruined Garden”. All in all, the choices that have been made here propose a path to enter into Moishe’s cultural world in a vivid way, allowing the reader to sense the Jewish atmosphere of the interwar era, in this specific place that was Lithuania, but also to measure the weight of history on the Jewish society through the eyes of an individual with exceptional gifts of observation and analyses in conditions of hardship.
