David Paul: … a few words about how we all come into it. It seems quite a long time ago now when Dorothee Van Tenderloo came to me and asked if I would be interested in her translation of work by Esther Kreitman. It was quite a long journey to discover her place in the Yiddish literary scene. I went to her agents and … didn’t even know who the agents were. I emailed around the world to other publishers, writers.
Eventually somebody said, “Well I think Maurice Carr, who translated the novel Deborah, lives in Paris.” So I went with Sylvia Paskin, my editor, who helped edit this book, to Paris and we met with Maurice Carr who was 89 years old and lives in this high-rise apartment near the Gare du Nord, rather like his mother who was forever living in … apartment … in London, as well as in her homeland of Poland.
So it has been an exciting journey. We were amazed when we first saw the first translation of the first story in the collection. It was something that was quirky and unique … So over to Sylvia…
Chair: Good afternoon everyone. Yes, it is quite a remarkable occasion. Esther Kreitman died fifty years ago. She had two younger brothers, both of whom were rather better known writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Israel Joshua Singer. She was the eldest of the family and … … She had quite a difficult, complex life, having to fight her background to become a writer.
She was born in 1891 in Bilgoray in Poland… … but she spent most of her adult life in Finland, which is fairly unique.
Dr Daphna Clifford has taught at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies. She also lectures in Yiddish and modern European Jewish and Israeli literature. She has written extensive and fascinating articles on Esther Kreitman …
To my right is Dorothee Van Tenderloo. Dorothee is a translator. She also works as a literary critic. She specialises in 20th century Yiddish, Hebrew and European Jewish literature.
Then, to my far right, is Rachel Morris who is going to do the readings. Rachel has worked for many different disciplines: radio, … television … She is currently appearing in Sheffield at the Crucible in the play The Man .
We are going to start this morning’s session with Rachel who is going to read the English version of the title story Blitz. But before she does that I have asked Dorothee to read you a few paragraphs in Yiddish so that you will get the flavour of what the Yiddish is like.
Dorothee Van Tenderloo:
“Ausgetroiden … der Jungen …
Rachel Morris: [Reads Blitz]
“A drawn-out wail, heavy and melancholy. …
… … was left to destroy.”
Chair: Thank you very much Rachel. We called the collection of stories Blitz because in fact half of them are about her old world, the world of Poland where she came from, and the other half are set in London. I wanted to begin by asking Daphna what her perception is of Esther Kreitman. Does she feel she is a British writer or a Polish writer or how does she see her, in what way?
Dr Daphna Clifford: Well first of all the amazing thing about Esther Kreitman was that she was ever a writer at all. Her brothers, considering the matter, decided there wasn’t enough room in Yiddish literature for three members of the Singer family and they decided that if someone should bow out gracefully, it should therefore be Esther because they themselves were too important. So she had no support in her own family.
During her lifetime, she didn’t really have a niche. She had a very female sensibility. She struggled with mental illness all her life and she lived between 1914 and 1954 in London. Therefore, her tragedy was the tragedy of the family that she was born into, into a very traditional Polish Hasidic family where she was not allowed to receive education. It was a deliberate family policy on the part of her father because her mother had been given the education of a boy by Esther’s grandfather and had become ‘difficult to manage’ for Esther’s father. Esther’s father wasn’t a very great mind but he was clever enough to work out that he couldn’t control his wife because she had too much self-confidence because she was too well educated and too rational and had developed her analytical abilities. So he determined that he wouldn’t ‘inflict’ that on any future son-in-law and he denied his daughter any education.
So she grew up intensely jealous and also adoring and admiring of her brother, I. J. Singer (who was I think probably the greatest of the Singer writers), and very much hysterically enamoured and doting on her younger brother. Isaac Bashevis was born 1904. So she had no real literary niche at all.
Post-war, even after her death, the Yiddish canon had more or less, for understandable historical reasons, been managed by American academics. Kreitman didn’t write about American themes or New York or anything like that, the way her brothers both did, or even about Florida or Miami. So there was no-one really to support her either. So her very delicate and intense observations and descriptions of mental illness really didn’t rank as mainstream interest in Yiddish literature because in those years of course people were interested in anti-Semitism, in the destruction of Polish Jewry, in the Holocaust, in the great themes, the tragic themes of Jewish destiny. She didn’t fit into any of that. So in fact she had multiple tragedies in her life, not fitting into any of the historical categories where she would have found sponsors and admirers.
If she had been born three generations later, she would now be a mainstream British writer because we now have books like Brick Lane by Monica Ali and White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and she would fall into that category. She is a London writer. You can hear from Blitz that it is the Blitz, the Second World War, the battle over the skies of the East End of London, described by a Londoner with a very slight Jewish tinge, because there is the woman who dies holding her wig and there are various Yiddish imprecations to God. But basically it is the life of a London which is the world that she knew and today she would partly be a member of the National Health Trust Board fund campaigning for mental health issues and partly be a mainstream English writer.
Chair: Thank you very much, Daphna, for encapsulating it so well. I am now going to ask Dorothee how she actually came across Esther Kreitman and what her experiences were of translating the work.
Dorothee Van Tenderloo: I came across Esther Kreitman’s work for the first time in 1996 when I was in student in Oxford and I took a course with Dr Clifford and she had very cleverly called the course ‘Women in Yiddish Literature’. This was a title that fascinated me from the start because of course it could mean several things. It could mean women as characters, as heroines in fiction, or it could mean female writers. As it turned out, most of the work that we looked at was indeed about female characters in work written by men.
However, there was one novel, Deborah, which turned out to be written by Esther Kreitman. So if only for that reason, I already thought that she was absolutely brilliant. At that time I hadn’t read any work written by Yiddish female authors so she was quite special for me in that respect. What I liked about her immediately was her topics. She was writing about things that I had never found in Yiddish short stories or novels. As you can see from Blitz, she is describing the East End, life in London during the war and just after the Second World War. So that was, for me, unique. Secondly, there was her particular style. There was absolutely nothing of the kind of schmaltzy approach that people who don’t know that much about Yiddish literature associate with it. Esther Kreitman is anything but that. She is sharp. She is critical. She is cynical. She can even be quite humorous. The story that we just heard is maybe not the best example, but I assure you that there are others in the book which really have you laughing all the time.
So that again was something which made her stand out from what I knew. Then, thirdly, and this is already moving onwards to the time when I was translating her and when I was much more delving into the stories themselves, what I appreciated about them was that they were in fact much more modern than I initially realised. Because what holds all these stories here together, both the London stories and the ones that are set in Stättelach in Poland, what holds all of them together is in fact a very modern theme. In my view that theme is the tension between tradition and modernity and the way people manage that tension: the conflicts, the compromises, the attempts to forget about the past, the realisation of dreadful loss. All of that is, I think, something which is not at all restricted to the Jewish world of the 1940s.
You could say that it is a battle which is still being fought today in the Jewish world, but also outside. As Daphna said, Esther Kreitman today would have links with authors like Monica Ali. This is the kind of literature which is of all immigrant communities.
Chair: Thank you very much. I just wanted to say this: David mentioned Maurice Carr who was Esther’s son whom we visited in Paris and from whom we acquired her literary estate. Maurice is probably known to some of you because he actually translated Deborah which Virago published about 1983. In a difficult life where, as I think Daphna has indicated, Esther started with a lot of difficulties and problems and in her personal relationships did not always get over them, her relationship with her son was, nevertheless, a very good one.
He was absolutely her champion and, at the back of the book, we have published a memoir by Maurice called My Uncle Yitzhak, which is about Isaac but also has a great deal to do with his mother and how she was treated by the family. It doesn’t put them in a very good light.
I would like to say that Maurice passed away shortly after we met him but we have dedicated the book to him because he was an utterly delightful man and he had really made it part of his life’s work to keep the flame with regard to his mother’s writing.
Deborah is being re-published or re-printed in America by the Feminist Press very shortly and we will be publishing it here in England. If any of you haven’t read it and you want to know a lot more about Esther Kreitman’s life, it’s a very fiercely autobiographical novel. We’re also going to be bringing out her only other novel which is called Brillianten which is set among the diamond workers in Antwerp.
Her husband, to whom she was extremely unhappily married, was a diamond worker in Antwerp and they lived there for a while. That book too details a lot about their lives there and coming to London.
I also forgot to say at the beginning that there will be signings of the book afterwards in the Ellis Room. I am going to ask Dorothee and Daphna another question but I wanted to say that this cover that we have, the portrait here, is by an artist called Abram Games and I believe his daughter is somewhere in the audience and has brought the original painting with. So, Naomi, are you here? Would you mind coming to the front and showing us the portrait and perhaps say a little about your father as well? And your brother, Daniel, is coming too. Naomi and Daniel Games. This is their father’s work. Perhaps you would like to say something about the portrait?
Chair: We’re honoured too because it is a really lovely painting. Thank you both very much indeed.
I went round to Naomi’s house because I wanted to try and use one of her father’s works for the book because he was more or less contemporary with Esther and he also had lived in the East End. I fell in love with this picture and there is a story in the collection called She is not blind and in this story there is a character called Madam Zesha. That tells you quite a lot: Madam Zesha. She is a rather beautiful woman of a certain age, heavily bejewelled, certainly quite a madam, and a very, very strong character. I rather thought that this portrait could have well been Madam Zesha so that was the reason I chose it and you will have to read the story to see what role Madam Zesha plays in the protagonists’ lives.
I just would like to ask Daphna: you touched a little bit on Esther’s difficult life. Could you say a little bit about how you feel these problems have shown themselves in her work?
Dr Daphna Clifford: Well, she wrote very little fiction. She wrote Deborah, which in Yiddish is called Der sheydim-tants which is a dance which takes place at a wedding. It’s a sort of danse macabre and that is the original title. It was published in Poland already. I have read the box of her correspondence: none of her letters but of all the people who wrote to her. There are wonderful handwritten letters in Yiddish which are in the YIVO collection in New York. During the entire process of the publication of her first work, the man who was publishing it and printing it assured her that he will print her first novel on the same day that he publishes her brother I. J. Singer’s novel and on the same quality paper, which gives you some idea already to start off with of what she was fighting against.
She was extremely sensitive always to any kind of slight. There are a lot of letters in the collection where she feels that she’s been ignored and wounded because she hasn’t been invited to somebody’s wedding or whatever, and she puts all this in. She is lucid enough and has enough mastery of her own inner turmoil to thematise all these anxieties and symptoms which marked her out as ‘freakish’. She had three forms of epilepsy, which is really terrible: grand mal, petit mal and a mixture, and she thematised these. She has women who are always causing a schibbich in the novels and she describes them. And sometimes she satirises them and she satirises portraits of women like that. In her elder brother I. J. Singer’s novel there is one character called Jeanette in his novel The Family Karnovsky and she takes the character: she calls her Jeanette and she makes her a kind of mad, hysterical, hyper-romantic spinster type woman.
So she was actually lucid enough to observe herself and to put her own symptoms into her novels. In the wedding scene which closes Deborah, it is basically a reconstruction of her own wedding in which she goes mad. She has some kind of epileptic fit or a psychotic episode and she tears off the long sleeves which are part of her wedding gown so she appears in 1912 naked and totally a disgrace and completely mad. And she puts this in.
So over the years of her writing, she develops increasing mastery of her own symptoms and is able to weave them quite technically into literature and to make art out of them. That is, of course, quite a triumph. She wrote two novels and a collection of stories. That is her fiction. But we haven’t touched on her relationship with other writers, which in many ways was the most important part of her life.
She corresponded with small publishers and newspaper printers in Buenos Aires, in Palestine, in Paris, in Antwerp between 1936 and the years after the Second World War and she wanted nothing more in life than to be part of the small, select circle in her view of Yiddish writers. That was all she wanted. She achieved that to a certain extent. There is this vast, voluminous correspondence in which you get a picture of what it was like to run the Yiddish publishing industry worldwide during the closing years of Polish Jewry and European Jewry. She was really part of that and all the things that you see, the publications and the press, were basically done by one man and a printer’s devil.
The prodigious effort, also the financial side: she hardly got paid and people would occasionally send her a £5 postal order or something. She sold her own books in the early years from her own flat in north London. Just the whole process of trying to stay alive and live from her ‘Yiddish pen’, as it was always called, was an exhausting and completely time-consuming business. But she was very much part of that world.
She was also the person that the group in Paris thought of when they opened a museum in 1937 called Der Yiddishe Kämpfer in Spanien: The Jewish Fighter in Spain, in the Spanish Civil War. She was the person they turned to. They wrote to her from Paris and asked if she could supply information, artefacts, exhibits for British Jewish Soldiers fighting in Spain.
Chair: Thank you very much. Actually that rings a bell with me because I have a book at home on the Spanish Civil War poetry and I think two of the earliest people to sign up as soldiers were two East End Jewish young men on a holiday with their bicycles and they were among the first people to sign up as soldiers.
Dorothee, I don’t know if you want to add anything? Did you, in translating Esther, get to know her? What’s your general feeling about her?
Dorothee Van Tenderloo: Yes, I would like to say a few things about what it is like to be translating a Yiddish author who is no longer alive and who comes from a particular part of Poland which comes with its particular version of Yiddish.
For every translator who works with a text written by an author who is no longer alive, it is always at the same time a tremendous journey of discovery and it is also terribly frustrating because you invariably come across words that are not in the dictionary, believe it or not. You ask around and people have never heard of these words. So, there you are. You are feeling quite helpless but, at the same time, you feel a kind of obligation, a sense of duty, towards that author that most people have no longer access to because they don’t have the linguistic tools to read it. So you just try to do the best job that you can.
In Esther’s particular case, because she wrote about life in London, she did mix in with the Yiddish an awful lot of English phrases: words, sometimes even whole sentences, in dialogue. That is quite funny because, you know, these words are not that difficult in English, but it is just recognising them for what they are in the Yiddish. Sometimes you just find yourself wracking your brain for half-an-hour and then you realise that what it says is actually ‘a cup of tea’ transliterated in the Yiddish and you think: Oh my God!
So that is, I think, quite telling of the kind of Yiddish that she writes. I wouldn’t say that she is a terribly difficult author and that is simply because she did write in the 20th century so it means that she herself is already with one foot in the outside world. She did come from this traditional Hasidic Polish Jewish world but at the same time she was living and reading and writing in England. So her language I found quite approachable, especially in comparison with the classical Yiddish authors of the 19th century. That is a completely different ballgame for a translator.
Chair: Thanks very much Dorothee. I think Daphna wants to add one more thing?
Dr Daphna Clifford: Esther Kreitman does have a very charming style. Also among the papers that I found she wrote to George Bernard Shaw and there is a letter from George Bernard Shaw saying that he never reads unsolicited manuscripts and he couldn’t read it anyway, but thanked her very much. She also wrote to Stefan Zweig, who had obviously heard of her and she got a very lovely letter back from him in German. Hers was a world of multi-lingual, polyglot, broad-based civilisation of Jewish refugees basically, in London, from a wide number of countries and she herself writes with scholarly Hebrew, which is astonishing. She must have just taught herself.
She got a very patronising letter from Josef Opatoshu, who was a very famous Yiddish writer in his day. He writes to her, “Ihr seit zehr grosse melumedet” “You are a very great scholar” using the Hebrew word for ‘scholar’. Then he carefully puts the vowels underneath because he obviously doesn’t think that her scholarship would cover the reading of the word ‘scholar’.
I don’t think we can possibly measure how she was patronised and humiliated really in her own world, in her own town. For anybody who has ever read the novels of I. J. Singer, her sentence structure is very like the sentence structure of I. J. Singer. You recognise it immediately and she has some lovely expressions which Bashevis Singer uses a lot. One of her favourite turns of phrase for describing someone who is useless and inept is somebody who “can’t tie a bow on a cat’s tail”, which is actually quite a charming picture.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed, Daphna. I am going to ask Dorothee to read the beginning of the story Clocks, which is also set in London, and then Rachel is going to read to you the story. You don’t have to go to bed, though, afterwards! You can go and have some lunch, so it’s not a bedtime story but a lunchtime story. We will allow a little bit of time for questions as well.
Dorothee Van Tenderloo: This is the beginning of Clocks, which in the Yiddish original is called Zeigers.
“Die yeden … … eingeschpacht.”
Rachel Morris: Clocks.
“Mrs Jacobson stood there again that evening … it was better to go and sleep in the shelter after all.”
Chair: We probably have time for just a couple of questions, but before we do that I would like to say some thank-yous. I would like to thank my publisher David Paul for all his commitment to this project. I would like to thank Naomi and Daniel Games for being kind enough to come with this beautiful painting that their father did. I would like to thank Daphna for coming from Oxford to be here today and lending her erudition and perception about Esther Kreitman to us, and for the help she gave us with the book. I’d like to thank Dorothee for her translation. Working with her was a great pleasure. And I would like to thank Rachel for her lovely readings. So, I’ve said all my thank-yous, I think. The signing will be in the Ellis Room, and now if anybody wants to ask some questions you have a minute or two to do it.
Questioner 1: I enjoyed the meeting very much indeed. What I would like to know is, not knowing anything about Yiddish: Is there a common Yiddish language or are there so many diverse sorts of areas or aspects to it? Because when you think that the Polish community was very isolated and then I just wonder whether Polish Yiddish would be understood by German Yiddish or English Yiddish speakers? I just wondered how communal the language is basically.
Chair: I think I’ll ask Daphna to answer that if she doesn’t mind.
Dr Daphna Clifford: Well of course there is the Yiddish language, but there was western Yiddish in the mediaeval period which was spoken in what was called Ashkenaz, which is the Jewish word for Germany. That died out within a generation or two, from the 1780s when Moses Mendelssohn originally translated the Bible into German and within a generation or two German Jews were speaking German. However, I have seen in Germany, in the Heinrich Heine Museum in Düsseldorf a letter from Heinrich Heine’s mother written in the 18th century, written in German-Yiddish in Hebrew letters. That was a very vibrant language.
After that, Yiddish was spoken, until the Second World War, in three main dialect zones: Polish-Yiddish, as you point out; north-eastern Yiddish, basically Lithuanian; and southern-eastern Yiddish which would be the Ukraine. The differences are really of vowel sounds and, in answer to your question as to whether people from all over Europe could understand each other: of course they understood each other. But it is also a question of education and strength of dialect. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, Yiddish was the language spoken across the largest geographical area in Europe because it was spoken from the valleys of Switzerland all the way across Russia. I don’t know if that answers your question?
Questioner 2: You told us that Esther had a great jealousy of her brothers and a troubled relationship with them, and I’d really like to know a little bit more about that and whether I. J. and I. B. S. were equally vile to their sister or whether they weren’t vile at all? I mean, was it in her mind? Was it a reality? What was the scene between the three of them?
Dr Daphna Clifford: Well the structure of the family was bizarre. I. J. Singer wrote in his memoir Of a world which is no more, … Welt was ist nicht … mehr:
“My mother and father would have been a perfectly designed couple if my mother had been my father and my father had been my mother.”
So his mother was a rationalist who was physically frail and spent all day, every day, virtually lying on a sofa reading very serious books. The father was a mystic and very stubborn and refused to pass the required state examination in the Russian language. So he could never get a proper a job at Zaravina [?]. It means that he was always on the starvation level doing the very lowest job as a kind of rabbinical arbitrator in the famous Kochmalgasse, in the Kochmalne Street in the heart of Jewish Warsaw. So the family was always on the verge of starvation and the mother didn’t function. In those days, of course, every meal that was on the table, some woman had put it there. So the one who did everything basically was Esther. She was the household drudge.
She was considered a freak and had epilepsy. First of all they came from a shtetl and then they moved to the city of Warsaw. There was no medical diagnosis and there was no treatment for epilepsy and she had various kinds as we have pointed out. So that was her burden. I. J. Singer was a rationalist to start off with. He was a realist and he had total physical freedom. He wandered all over Warsaw himself. He went to school or he didn’t go to school, whatever he did. In the First World War he was a pacifist and he moved into a painter’s and artist’s atelier. His first career that he chose was to be a painter.
Esther had no physical freedom at all. None. She fought bitterly with her mother and at one moment she found the quarrels unendurable and, in a moment of hysteria. She said, “Right, then just marry me off and hate me”. And that is how she ended up married to Avrom Kreitman because a Polish brillianten Yid, a diamond Jew, came from Antwerp looking for the daughter of an illustrious scholar and picked her up. That’s how it was.
So it was structural as well. She had no physical freedom. As a child, she had only adoration for Bashevis because he was much younger. She was born in 1891 and he was born in 1904. Then she was married. Later in life he was very cruel to her and very cold. There are letters, some asking for money to help with the rent and he just says “Nun ”, he says ‘No”. And I have seen a letter, written not even to her but to her husband whom Maurice Carr, her son, has always described as a schlemiel, saying that no, he could not give her any money and so forth.
I don’t know if that clarifies the position slightly for you. When she was older, the eldest brother died very suddenly, very young. He died in February of 1944. I. J. Singer died very suddenly. And there was another brother, Moshe, who died during the war. That was a younger sibling. He was not a writer. He was very religious and very Hasidic. So then it was Bashevis who was left and they didn’t live in the same place. He went to America. He was brought over to America in 1935 by I. J. Singer and Kreitman, as we know, had been living in London since 1914. She was very deeply unhappy in London and wanted desperately to be a writer so for six months, a couple of times, they brought her over to Warsaw in the early ’thirties, before they emigrated and the brothers couldn’t stand her. They just sent her packing back to London.
Chair: In fact, in the memoir that Maurice writes, My Uncle Yitzhak, it speaks of a journey that he and his mother took back to Poland, so you could see how they treated her from that. And there is a famous incident where Isaac Bashevis Singer said to Maurice Carr, “Your mother was a mad woman” and Maurice never, ever spoke to him again after that.
Questioner 3: One question has already been answered but I also wanted to know whether there is any evidence that Isaac Bashevis Singer or any of the brothers had read or commented on anything that Esther Kreitman wrote?
Chair: Well there is actually: in our introduction there is a quote. He did actually make a fairly complimentary remark. I can sense that Dorothee wants to say something.
Dorothee Van Tenderloo: I was just going to say the same thing as you because I think it is very contradictory to what we heard before about the awful treatment that they gave her personally. When Bashevis was asked to comment on the literary capabilities of his sister he said quite simply, “There is no other woman in Yiddish literature who writes better”.
Questioner 3: Did she know that he said that?
Dr Daphna Clifford: Can I just say that that famous sentence of Isaac Bashevis about Esther has been deconstructed by American Yiddish literary analysts to read as follows. He said, “There is no Yiddish woman writer I know of who wrote better than my sister”. But it was a way of praising himself obliquely. That is really what it has been deconstructed as.
I also have to say, and perhaps some of you know that, that in the famous building on Tlomacki 13 in Warsaw which was the home of the famous Yiddish Writers’ and Journalists’ Association, there were women who circulated there and who went there. First of all, people went there very often just to the cafeteria to get something to eat. There were people who were involved in Hebrew literature and who were known as the literarische beilagen, as ‘the literary supplements’. It shows you the way the esteem in which they were held.
Chair: One more question and that’s it.
Questioner 4: I would just like to share one thing. In 1985 I was in America and spoke to Isaac Bashevis Singer and I asked him his reaction to Deborah and there was this total disdain and he changed the subject.
Chair: That says it all.
Questioner 4: That tells it, yes. He told the whole audience that.
Chair: Well, I don’t want you to hold her in disdain. She is actually a very fine writer. She died fifty years ago and it is time her work received the recognition it deserves. Thank you all very, very much for coming.
[End]
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