1) science fiction in Yiddish
Sent on: 04/23/2000 15:23:28
David Hewitt asks about science fiction in Yiddish. Although I've made the argument in a book review once that Yosef Perl's Megale tmirin is a kind of science fiction (if you're willing to accept practical kabole as a kind of science...) science fiction proper owes its start, like so much of our literature, to Mendele Moykher-Sforim, who translated a Jules Verne novel into Yiddish in the late 1860s, then parodied parts of his translation in the balloon sequences of Di kliatshe.... I know that works by Verne, Jack London, and H.G. Wells were translated into Yiddish during the glory days of Yiddish publishing (from about the 1890s until the 1930s). Keep in mind that articles on science, and science as a general topic of discussion was of enormous interest in secular Yiddish circles of that era; an article about Darwinism is, for example, the only really memorable entry in the first number of Di tsukunft (1892).
As far as original science fiction novels in Yiddish, I know of only one genuine example: Af yener zayt Sambatyon, by one L. Borodulin (1929). Borodulin was a Yiddish journalist who wrote mostly science articles for Der Tog. His novel, by the way, earns a footnote in Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers (p. 546). My wife and I have read the first 50 or so pages together; it's mostly pretty entertaining--about a journalist in search of a mad scientist who has found his way to the land of the Red Jews after having invented a death ray. The Sambatyon river, it turns out, is made of a series of geysers--hence the regular eruptions that have prevented travelers (all accept this scientist and journalist, apparently) from crossing it all these years.... An intriguing mix of (Jewish) mythology and contemporary problems--like all the best science fiction in other languages.
Marc Caplan
As far as original science fiction novels in Yiddish, I know of only one genuine example: Af yener zayt Sambatyon, by one L. Borodulin (1929). Borodulin was a Yiddish journalist who wrote mostly science articles for Der Tog. His novel, by the way, earns a footnote in Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers (p. 546). My wife and I have read the first 50 or so pages together; it's mostly pretty entertaining--about a journalist in search of a mad scientist who has found his way to the land of the Red Jews after having invented a death ray. The Sambatyon river, it turns out, is made of a series of geysers--hence the regular eruptions that have prevented travelers (all accept this scientist and journalist, apparently) from crossing it all these years.... An intriguing mix of (Jewish) mythology and contemporary problems--like all the best science fiction in other languages.
Marc Caplan