Translation as Testimony: Hebrew Translations of Yiddish Literature in the 1940s

During World War II, literary translation provided one of the few ways in which Hebrew readers living in Mandatory Palestine could encounter there, war-torn Europe. From Zusman Segalovitsh's There... to Avraham Shlonsky's Poems of the Times, Hebrew translations of Yiddish poetry and prose grapple with the horrors of war and the legacy of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. These texts reveal conscious efforts by translators and editors to situate Yiddish literature within Hebrew cultural and political discourse. Yiddish provides Hebrew readers with glimpses of there, while Hebrew preserves those experiences not only as Jewish cultural artifacts, but in their translation, as forms of testimony. Examining a series of translations from Yiddish into Hebrew from the early 1940s, this article traces how Yiddish texts and Yiddish itself were transformed from a cultural threat to testimonies from a destroyed world.