My BA thesis (entitled Der Tsoyberbarg un(d) Der Zauberberg: Bashevis’s Translation of The Magic Mountain and the Project of Yiddish Bildung) examines Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish translation of Thomas Mann’s famous Bildungsroman in the context of the educational/formational project of interwar Yiddish literary translation. By translating great works of world literature into Yiddish, Bashevis and others sought to enrich the literature and bring it into contact with the velt, that is to say, the secular, European world.
This advertisement (from the Yiddish literary paper Literarishe Bleter, 26th February 1932) is a particularly rich testament to the functioning of this contact-forming ideology of translation. It begins by referring to the Tsoyberbarg as a “great gift to [their] subscribers.” The promise is this: worldliness for just 9.80 guldens, translated by one Yitskhok Bashevis and edited by Dr. M. Veykhert, who was important to the project not just for his worldly credential (a J.D. from the University of Vienna) but also for his earlier advocacy for Mann’s work in the Yiddish press and his footnoting of the translation. This intervention transformed the Bildungsroman into a piece of worldly Bildungsmaterial for the Yiddish reader – a portable university to which the Jews could not be barred entry.
Here, the novel is described as containing the universal with such language as “all the problems, dreams, doubts of contemporary humanity,” “world-writers,” and “the entire ideological world-struggle on the eve of the world-war.” The world velt, which in Yiddish signifies “the world” and “the worldly/secular/mundane” simultaneously, is emphasized and repeated. In its final sentence, the advertisement imagines a community of the Yiddish readers who will be in contact with the literature of the velt in its final sentence: “Every inteligent should be in possession of Tsoyberbarg.” An inteligent is primarily a member of the intelligentsia, that is, a member of the broader European intellectual elite. This is not a word of native Yiddish origin but an imported, international word. Even its use suggests an international contact that extends beyond Jewish parochialism. Membership in this class of inteligentn is not necessarily precluded by membership in the traditional Jewish intellectual elite, but the inteligent cannot be schooled in this alone. Though knowledge of Rashi and the Rambam is permissible, the inteligent must know Goethe and Tolstoy. The translation project of world literature into Yiddish actively strove towards the formation of this community of Yiddish inteligentn.