Joseph Ravese

Date of Award

2025

First Advisor

Nancy Bonvillain

Second Advisor

Justin Jackson

Abstract

Chaim Grade was one of the very last secular Yiddish novelists, and it is not until quite recently that many of his works have been available to translate. His works show a constant struggle between tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, poor and rich, women and men, and are altogether an earnest attempt to faithfully depict and recreate his memories of his home before the Second World War and to understand how to mourn such loss. Over the course of this year, I have created the first ever English translation of his 1976 novel Der shtumer minyen: dertseylungen, or, as I have called it, Tales of the Silent Minyan. The novel follows a long line of characters who populated Vilna (Vilnius) before the War, evidently based on real people or archetypes of people (i.e., the porushes, spending day and night for Torah study and living on charity), but primarily a lowly carpenter, Alikum Pap, with aspirations of one day being recognized as a great artist. He loses himself in this pursuit, neglecting his wife and children, until realizing that he must finally return to them. The novel, and the translation, are also a meditation on the state of the Yiddish language today. Declining from its pre-War height of as many as twelve million speakers globally, there are not so many as one million alive today, but the current population has stopped declining, it is stable. Yiddish is eking out its niche in the world once again. My hope for this translation is that it may serve as an introduction or exploration of the topics of Yiddish language and Jewish culture, one which may be not just thought-provoking and entertaining, but educational and informative, openly showing the reader various aspects of the translation process. From this, I hope that the reader will continue to read Yiddish literature in translation or the original, perhaps even to take a class. I hope, in other words, that this is a story – that is, both Grade’s story and my own – which sparks the curiosity of the reader to take the next steps into a larger world.

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