Reflections on an American Jewish translator’s decision to embed Yiddish words into her English translations of an Argentine Jewish writer’s stories written in Spanish, and how it both pays homage to the Ashkenazi women responsible for passing down Yiddish and taps into the intertwined history of Jews in the Americas.
The first time I came across Tali Goldman’s voice, it was not on the page but in my ears. The Argentine journalist produced an episode of the podcast Las raras, titled “Seria y dulce,” in which she documents her experience listening to audio recordings of her late paternal grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor from Poland. I was deeply moved by Tali’s story. She and I are only a few years apart in age, and I’m the American great-granddaughter of eight Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Curiously, in addition to English, my first language, I don’t speak Yiddish or Russian, but Spanish and Portuguese. This has led me to wonder on more than one occasion if some of my relatives left their shtetls at the turn of the twentieth century and sailed to the port of Buenos Aires instead of Ellis Island in New York, their descendants destined to learn castellano instead of English.
After listening to her story, I connected with Tali on the social network formerly known as Twitter, which is how I discovered that, in addition to her reporting, she had also written a book of short stories. I managed to order Larga distancia (Concreto Editorial, 2020) from an Argentine bookseller and have it shipped internationally to me in Philadelphia. In a December 2020 interview with María Elvira Woinilowicz for Argentina’s Página 12 newspaper, Tali described the universe of Larga distancia [Long Distance] as one inhabited by “mujeres, viejas, judías,” a phrase that one might translate as “women, old women, Jewish women.” (Did she mean a bunch of yentas and their alter kocker husbands as secondary characters?) When the book finally arrived, I was struck by Tali’s wit, sense of humor, and keen emotional intelligence. She dealt with heavy themes like migration, the constraints of tradition, illness, death, and grief, but with a wink and an elbow nudge, a dose of levity to make it go down easier (and only a handful of yentas). The way she had woven threads of comedy into tragedy also struck me as very Jewish in nature, which is not easy to define but I know it when I see it. It made me recall an oft repeated family story about my own paternal grandmother, Raye, as she was lying on her deathbed in the hospital but still lucid. At one point she roused from a nap, noticed all the family members solemnly gathered around her, and cut the tension with a joke: “Am I dead yet?”
I promptly emailed Tali to ask for her permission to translate her stories into English, and she kindly did a mitzvah by saying yes.
When I read the title story of Larga distancia, which is written as a stream of unbroken phone dialogue between a middle-aged Argentine woman living in Israel and her mother in Buenos Aires, I could hear decades-old phone calls with my grandmothers Raye and Sandra (and more recent ones with my Aunt Robbie) replaying in my head. Later, when I was translating the story, these women became my archetype for the voice of the mother in English. Another thing I heard in my head that was not present in the original text were fragments of a third language: Yiddish. I only know a handful of words, but these are indelibly associated in my brain with my older Jewish relatives. And although there are much fewer Argentine Jews that speak Yiddish today than there were in the last century, it was as if Yiddish were an intangible presence in Tali’s text, words printed in invisible ink between the lines that could only be seen by someone with pure Jewish guilt in her heart.
Once again I emailed Tali, this time to ask her for permission to use a few Yiddish words in my translations, and she said yes a second time.
For me, and for a lot of American Jews, Yiddish is a lost heritage language of which a few words are all that remains. In my family, we know from a memory journal that belonged to my aforementioned Grandma Raye that she didn’t like going to school at first because she only spoke “Jewish,” which at the time was a common term for the language spoken by Ashkenazi immigrants in New York—not to mention the literal meaning of the word “Yiddish.” Once she learned English, she was able to make friends more easily and thus embarked on her journey toward English dominance, a voyage undertaken almost universally by all second-generation Americans. On the maternal side of my family tree, my New York-born grandparents spoke Yiddish with each other so their daughters wouldn’t understand them. And although I never called my maternal grandfather zayde (named Jacob, he was simply Grandpa Jack to us), he always called me sheine meidele. Similarly to how much Yiddish is now spoken by my family, only a bisl appears in my translations of Tali’s stories.
Here in the United States, a bisl of choice Yiddish words interjected into an English-language passage or performance is often the bread and butter—or better yet, the bagels and lox—of American Jewish comedic sensibilities. Mel Brooks may be the crowning example of this. My father’s impression of his elderly relatives “from the old country” was an amateur version of Brooks’ 2,000 Year-Old Man routine, I would realize later in life. Unfortunately, most of my Yiddish-speaking family members from Poland, Ukraine, and Russia died before I was born. They didn’t completely pass down their language to us, but they did, apparently, pass down their schticks unscathed.
And who can even count the number of American Jewish comedians who, like Brooks, have made a fortune off their schticks? There’s Billy Crystal, for one, an actor and comedian who had already infiltrated my cultural consciousness as a six-year-old kid. I know this because I am still in possession of my first-grade school journal, a black-and-white lined composition book where I wrote (and illustrated) my responses to the prompts our teacher would write on the chalkboard each day. On one of the yellowed pages appears the date May 22, 1990 and the prompt: “If you could meet a famous person, who would it be?” My answer in colorful bubble letters? “Billy Cristel” [sic]. Among my generation, one of the roles Crystal is known for is Miracle Max in the 1987 fantasy adventure comedy film The Princess Bride (directed by the late, great director Rob Reiner, also Jewish), in which he played a fairy tale-variety sorcerer as an elderly Jewish man, speaking English with an over-the-top Yiddish accent, and even doing a bit with a made-up Yiddish word.
The viewer doesn’t necessarily have to have Yiddish-speaking ancestors to intuit Miracle Max’s Ashkenazi extraction, since Crystal is known for his mock Yiddish, chock full of guttural sounds and spittle. Brooks and Crystal are just two of the innumerable Jewish figures in the American entertainment landscape responsible for uniting the use of Yiddish with Jewish comedy in English, which has, in turn, greatly influenced American comedy as a whole. Words like schmuck, schmooze, schlep, and schnoz are all entries in the Merriam Webster online dictionary of American English. (I recently listened to a podcast where Leanne Morgan, a blonde goy comedian who grew up in a small farming town in Tennessee, used the words schtick and schlep, spoken in her natural accent and without batting an eyelash.) American Jews had to enter show business because they were shut out of other professions due to antisemitic prejudice, but they found a backdoor into mainstream American culture via a comedic dusting of Yiddish slang.
Translation purists forgive me, but when inklings of that familiar Jewish sense of humor surface in Tali’s writing, Yiddish words can’t help but come to mind for me, even though the author doesn’t represent this in her narration or dialogue between Jewish characters. (In fact, it’s English words, not Yiddish ones, that punctuate the Spanish spoken by one of her characters who has lived for decades in the United States.) When I was looking into the presence of Yiddish in Argentine Spanish, I came across an undergraduate senior thesis written in 2024 by Shannon Rebecca Friel, a Swarthmore College student (now graduate) from Argentina. In the introduction to her sociolinguistic study of the mutual intelligibility of Yiddish words between present-day speakers from Argentina and the United States, she describes growing up in Buenos Aires in a family where Yiddish was always present, “even though nobody could articulate more than two whole sentences.” She later points out that “code-switching is in Yiddish’s soul” as a language born from contact between multiple languages and spoken by a people on the move. I also learned from Friel’s background research that Yiddish had a different relationship to the Spanish language and Gaucho culture in rural areas of Argentina than it did in Buenos Aires, and while the use of Yiddish declined among Jews in the port city as they strived to assimilate, the language did have an influence on the immigrant-created porteño slang known as lunfardo.
To put some flesh on my bare-bones understanding of how Yiddish words figure in modern Argentine Spanish, I spoke with Tali about her personal experience. There were few examples that she could think of beyond “no me rompas el tujes,” which is a common phrase you might hear even though most people don’t realize that “tujes” comes from Yiddish (and which roughly translates to “get off my tuchus”). It took me a moment to register that “tujes” is the Argentine version of tuchus, but once I did, I found myself in a fit of laughter. Different regional pronunciations are also in Yiddish’s soul, and hearing a word that is so familiar to me cut and pasted into a phrase that is so very porteño was unexpectedly hilarious and delightful.
Given that Yiddish words are much more prevalent in American English than they are in Argentine Spanish, I’m open to the argument that I’m projecting my North American Jewish perspective onto Tali’s work, but I’m also convinced there are moments in my translations when the right Yiddish word enhances the story without domesticating it. For example, in “La Doctora Venturini,” for which Tali was awarded a prize at the 2019 Bienal de Arte Joven Buenos Aires, the protagonist is a young Orthodox Jewish woman from the Argentine capital who recounts her gynecologist’s seemingly miraculous solution to help her get pregnant and prevent her husband from divorcing her. (I’ve titled this story “The Miracle Worker” in English, and it only just occurred to me that perhaps this was a subconscious homage to Miracle Max.) The main character can’t bring herself to call her husband’s genitalia by any name but “miembro” [“member”]. I spoke to Tali about using a Yiddish word in my translation, as a way for the character to avoid the embarrassment of saying it in Spanish or English. As I presently consider the topic of Yiddish words used as euphemisms for the names of genitalia in English, I recall the 2001 book by comedian Amy Borkowsky, Amy’s Answering Machine, in which she transcribes and comments on real messages left by her mother on her answering machine, a piece of now obsolete but once ubiquitous technology. Completely out of the blue one day, her perpetually worried Jewish mother recorded an admonishment about lambskin condoms being “the same as if the guy had a totally naked shmekel.” When translating Tali’s very funny story, I actually considered schmeckle (all these farkakte transliterations and different spellings!) but eventually went with schtupper, a word whose unromantic, mechanical connotation works perfectly in this context, for reasons I’ll allow future readers to discover on their own.
Speaking of telephone technology, Jewish mothers, and Yiddish, in my translation of “Larga distancia” (“Long Distance” in English), the title story of Tali’s book, the daughter tries to convince her mother to emigrate to Israel, saying, “Pero, mami, estarías más tranquila, sin renegar todo el día como estás allá…” which I’ve translated as “But, Mami, I’m telling you, you’d be better off here, you wouldn’t have so much to kvetch about like you do there…” The verb “renegar” here means to complain, gripe, grumble. Why not bypass the imprecision of English and go straight to the Yiddish kvetch? Despite its tongue-twisting consonants, kvetch is such a useful word that it also has its own Merriam Webster entry.
The more I used Yiddish in my translations of Tali’s stories, the more I started to analyze my own choice—or was it a compulsion? I began to see a web of connections ranging from Alaska to Patagonia and from the current moment in America’s story all the way back to the colonial era. In the United States, Spanish is a colonial language that has been spoken here for over five centuries as well as the diasporic language of millions of Latin American immigrants. Yiddish and Ladino, the two most common Jewish languages spoken in the Americas, are inherently diasporic. Something Spanish and Yiddish have in common, therefore, is that they are a sort of connective tissue binding tempest-tost families and communities across generations and borders.
The final story in Tali’s book, titled “Walking Distance” in both Spanish and English, is written as a series of emails exchanged between an elderly Argentine Jewish man living with his wife in New York and his widowed sister-in-law living in a Jewish nursing home in Buenos Aires. In one of the emails, the man tells his sister-in-law about the Mexican woman who helps take care of him and his wife. He observes that she barely speaks English and her grandchildren don’t speak Spanish, so they can hardly communicate. He then confesses that he and his own grandchildren face a less extreme but similar language barrier. “A mí me dicen abuelo y a Rita abuela, pero después el resto todo, todo en inglés.” [“They call me abuelo and Rita abuela, but after that, it’s all English.”] In my family, Yiddish succumbed to the same fate as the Mexican grandmother’s Spanish; the first language of all four of my New York-born grandparents is now all but lost two generations later. Nevertheless, for Spanish-speaking and Yiddish-speaking (and other language-speaking) families in the United States, a small collection of words continues to be passed down, like treasured heirlooms.
It dawns on me that, while men like Crystal and Brooks loom large in my awareness of Jewish comedic sensibilities, the Yiddish heirlooms that live in my head were deposited there by the women in my family. Researcher Alicia Ramos-González has shown that, in Eastern Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Yiddish was “the language of female spaces” as women navigated and overcame language barriers in daily social interactions, bringing the latest news from outside the neighborhood home and into the kitchen, where the children were surely gathered for a nosh and a language lesson. Excluded from the formal education in Hebrew reserved only for men, Ashkanazi women became the writers and readers of literature in Yiddish during this era. In an article for the Jewish Women’s Archive, Nurit Orchan describes some of the themes that Yiddish-speaking women wrote about in their articles, stories, and letters to the editor, including concerns about the transition from communal to urban life, working conditions and labor unions, women’s status in society, and the struggle to pass on Jewish identity to their children. (These are not so different from the themes of Tali’s fiction writing; even as a journalist, she wrote a book about women and the labor movement in Argentina.) Beginning in the nineteentth century, Ashkenazi men began to adopt Yiddish as a literary language, which has partially eclipsed the important role of women in our historical understanding of Yiddish literature. Here in the twenty-first century, bringing Yiddish words into my translations of stories where the protagonists are mainly Jewish women feels like a tiny act of tikkun olam, sewing up a hole in the babushka headscarf tied around the space-time continuum to connect Tali’s work with our ancestral bubbes (bobes in Tali’s version of Yiddish) in Eastern Europe and adding another thread connecting all Jews here in the Americas.
To comprehend just how deeply intertwined the history of Jews in the Americas is, we must take a five-century detour to 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue (what a schlep!) and the Catholic Monarchs kicked the Jews out of Spain (oy vey, here we go again!). Many Jewish conversos left Spain for the so-called Nuevo Mundo, where they continued to practice their traditions in secret, and by the seventeenth century there was a large Sephardic community in Dutch colonial Suriname and Brazil. (Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, is like a linguistic postcard from the Sephardic Jews who fled the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century, showing the contact their Spanish had with other languages.) It is from the Dutch colonies, in fact, that the first organized group of Jews to settle in the United States hailed; they fled Brazil after the Portuguese colonizers forcibly took the already stolen territory from the Dutch. Facing the threat of the Iberian Inquisition, these Jews bounced around a number of other Spanish and English colonies only to be turned away, until a few fellow Jews on the board of the Dutch West India Company pulled some strings so their brethren could remain in the colony that would eventually become Manhattan.
The expulsion and the exodus of Jews from all four corners of Europe, from the late middle ages to the mid-twentieth century, helped shape and connect communities up and down the entire Western Hemisphere. (And I recognize that so far I’ve only casually referred to the Holocaust and places in the Pale of Settlement, where antisemitic pogroms forced my great-grandparents to emigrate at the turn of the twentieth century.) In her 1981 memoir Las genealogías, Mexican Jewish author Margo Glantz paints a portrait of her father, the Ukrainian-born poet Jacobo (Yaacov) Glantz, who spoke Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Spanish. (Margo Glantz also writes about her uncle who lived in Philadelphia, the city from which I write this.) I recently discovered that in 1938, Jacobo Glantz published an epic poem in Yiddish about the Americas titled Kristobal Kolon, which I gather to be a transliteration in English characters of a Yiddish-accented pronunciation of Cristóbal Colón, as Christopher Columbus is called in Spanish. Since I can’t read the poem myself, I must rely on Rachel Rubenstein’s description of it from a 2022 article that appeared in In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies:
[Glantz] retells the Americas’ most iconic foundational myth using two unlikely guides: Luis de Torres, glancingly mentioned by Columbus as a Jew hired to serve as an interpreter, is at the center of Glantz’s retelling, with substantial passages dedicated to the narrative of Guacanagari, a cacique also briefly described in Columbus’s journals. In Glantz’s poem, both De Torres and Guacanagari are traumatized survivors of the Inquisition and of conquest, whose imagined experiences of war and enslavement in the New World serve to connect disparate geographies, histories, and peoples in a powerful revisionist narrative. Written in a multilingual Yiddish with Spanish, Taíno, Latin, and Hebrew borrowings, Glantz’s masterwork offers a transnational vision of the Americas that insists—in Yiddish—on its Jewish, Muslim, indigenous and African origins, suggesting a new geography for American Jewish literature that exceeds the boundaries of what we understand the Americas and Jewishness to be, and challenging our expectations of what Yiddish literature can contain.
Rubenstein theorizes that Kristobal Kolon upends our fixed definitions of the Americas (a place), Jewishness (an identity), and Yiddish literature (a collection of texts in a language). As I reflect on what drives me to embed Yiddish into my English translations of an Argentine Jewish author’s stories written in Spanish, I find that I, too, am floating about in Jacobo Glantz’s metaphysical lava lamp where our ideas about language, literature, and translation are malleable and constantly moving and morphing.
According to international law, translators who write about their craft are required to come up with metaphors for translation. Therefore I submit the following for your consideration: translation removes the inedible peel from a fruit so that the reader can enjoy the fragrant flesh inside. In other words, we translators metabolize what, in the eyes of the reader, is the tough, bitter, outward appearance of insurmountable difference—an unintelligible language—so that said reader can more easily digest stories that reveal our differences as well as our common human frailties and our remarkable resilience. By using Yiddish in my translations of Tali Goldman’s stories, I hope that I also heighten the English-speaking reader’s understanding that her universe of “mujeres, viejas, judías” is part of the cosmic realm of Americanness, in the hemispheric sense of the word. A little bit like how the foods on the Passover seder plate offer a sensory experience to heighten our understanding of the Exodus story: it’s not just salt water, it’s the tears of a people long oppressed.
Even after this whole schpiel, I admit that I still feel wistful about my meager knowledge of Yiddish. Sure, I have a bisl to sprinkle into my translations, but I can’t make an entire pot of matzo ball soup out of it. It often feels like a phone signal that’s permanently dropped out, cutting off the long distance call between my ancestors and me. To make matters worse, instead of learning my own heritage language, I’ve dedicated an enormous amount of effort over many years of my life to learning Spanish and Portuguese. I’m like Miami after the Cuban Revolution: once a majority-Jewish beach town, now the Gateway to Latin America. (I’ll be here all night, folks!)
Perhaps I was drawn to Larga distancia because I recognized a similar sort of wistfulness in Tali’s characters, along with the impulse to use humor to cope with it. Perhaps I was drawn to the idea of using Yiddish in my translations of Tali’s writing to be able to tap into the pan-American feelings of perpetual uprootedness, the longing for connection to our respective ancestors and ancestral lands, and the existential worry about getting kicked out or turned away.
Or perhaps it was simply beshert.
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