Rilke and Mandelstam in Yiddish

The Jewish Community Center of St. Petersburg held a literary event led by Yoel Matveyev, our website’s editor-in-chief, who presented a selection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Osip Mandelstam’s poems translated into Yiddish. Soon after the event, Matveyev’s translations were published in the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern.

Mandelstam’s poetry had been translated into Yiddish by several poets, including Aron Vergelis, the editor-in-chief of the Soviet literature and art magazine Sovetish Heymland. To the best of our knowledge, Matveyev was the first to translate Rilke into Yiddish. Despite the apparent similarity, Yiddish is quite different from German on every level. As the translator explains in his Birobidzhaner Shtern essay, he had to rewrite every one of Rilke’s lines from scratch, and not just to “touch up” the German language, as some people would mistakenly think.

Regarding Sovetish Heymland and its legacy, we are happy to inform our readers that we already have digitized most of its issues from 1961 to 1991 and published all of the them on our website. Soon we hope to present all issues of this highly influential historical magazine, which often contained poetry translations from Russian and other languages into Yiddish.

Marc Chagall: The Joy of Earth’s Gravity

The new exhibit Marc Chagall: The Joy of Earth’s Gravity at the Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts features numerous items related to or written in Yiddish. World famous as a painter, Chagall also wrote poetry and articles on literature and art in his mother tongue, Yiddish. He was a close friend of many Yiddish authors whose books he illustrated.

The exhibit, which will remain open till March 15, 2026, is accompanied with quotes from Chagall’s autobiography My Life, and dedicated to the artist’s work in Russia from the late 1900s to 1922. Some of the items from private collections are presented to the public for the first time.

The most prominent feature of the new exhibition is a huge composition of seven enormous murals painted by Chagall for the Jewish Chamber Theater in 1920. Another, more humble and yet very important item is a rare 1917 edition of Der Nister’s fairytales with Chagall’s illustrations. An electronic installation next to it shows magnified pages of this book.

Photo credit: Y. and D. Matveyev

Contemporary Yiddish Poetry with Russian Translations

The Jewish publishing house Knizhniki in Moscow published a bilingual volume of original contemporary Yiddish poetry with Russian translations titled I Return (“איך קער זיך אום”.“Я возвращаюсь”). Realized under the auspices of the private publisher Boris Zaitschick, the book has been composed and edited by Yoel Matveyev, the editor-in-chief of our website.

A short anthology of contemporary Yiddish poetry with Russian translations (42 poems by 17 authors) had already been included in the 2023 issue of the almanac Birobidzhan, but the new poetry book from Moscow is a major new milestone dedicated to the same subject.

As explained in the preface and in the co-editor’s Dr. Valery Dymshitz’s introduction, the book focuses on generational, gender and stylistic diversity of today’s Yiddish poetry. By any means it’s not meant to be an exhaustive anthology. It contains 120 poems by 12 poets who live in 7 countries: Lev Berinsky, Felix Chaimovich, Mikhoel Felsenbaum, Velvl Chernin, Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, Yisroel Nekrasov, Beruriah Wiegand, Sholem Berger, Yoel Matveyev, Marek Tuszewicki, Katerina Kuznetsova and David Omar Cohen.

“Yiddish Sherlock Holmes” in English

The Yiddish literature has its own famous detective: Max Spitzkopf, the “Yiddish Sherlock Holmes”. For the first time his adventures, written by Jonas Kreppel (1874-1940), were published in English, translated by Mikhl Yashinsky, mainly known as an actor and theater researcher who recently has also published another important book, the English translation of the memoirs of the pioneering Yiddish actress Ester-Rokhl Kaminska.

According to Jonas Kreppel’s imagination, Max Spitzkopf lived in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire. The series of books about his adventures were originally published in Austro-Hungary and gained great popularity among local Jews, especially in Galicia. In 1938, after the Nazi occupation of Austria, Kreppel was sent the the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died in 1940.

Interestingly, some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s world-famous stories about Sherlock Holmes have also been translated into Yiddish by David Hermalin in 1928. Quite a few Yiddish readers were familiar with both imagined detectives, the London-based Sherlock Holmes and the Vienna-based Jewish Max Spitzkopf.

Free Online Yiddish Classes in Russian

Yiddish Poetry Evening in St. Petersburg

The art exhibition Shtetl on Fontanka. From Chagall to the Present in St. Petersburg, covered by our website’s news section in July, was concluded by a poetry evening. Several poets and poetry translators recited their Russian translations of Abraham Sutzkever, Moyshe Kulbak, Leib Kvitko, Aaron Glanz-Leyeles and other famous Yiddish poets. We offer our readers a video recording of one part of the event, in which Yoel Matveyev, the editor-in-chief of this site, himself a poet and translator, recited his poetry translations from Yiddish.