À Propos de L’Odyssée d’un voleur de pommes de Moïshe Rozenbaumas

Presentation by Isabelle Rozenbaumas at la Maison de la Culture Yiddish in Paris June 2004

Translated from French by Carol Cosman

DOUBLE FIDELITY AND DOUBLE BETRAYAL

This book is the outcome of a long process of writings, writings in the plural. As Moishé told you, he took up his pen in 1994. The text that I read for the first time in the summer of 1997, in Berkeley, California, was written in Yiddish. It already had – at least in its chapter divisions – the shape of the text published today by La Cause des Livres. And I could recognize in it the thought, heft and care of a story told by a man who had taken on history with a capital H.

Rather quickly I undertook a translation of some twenty pages of the manuscript, which, while seeming almost passable, made me uneasy. Something like “my style” was detectable. My first impulse was interrupted, then, as much by this unease as by other translation projects. When I returned to this task, around 1999 or 2000, Moishé had once again taken up his pen and translated his own text in his way, amending it as he went along, and in a French that I shall call here “my father’s tongue,” tate loshen. I will not review the distinctive features of this second original, which I tried to characterize in an afterword.

Now I had before me not one text but two, the original Yiddish and Moishé’s translation. My association with Yiddish, under the benevolent rule of demanding teachers, had only confirmed in my eyes the canonicity of every Yiddish original. What can be said, then, about the canonicity of a text written by Moishé himself in Yiddish, under what I suspected was some metaphysical inspiration? And what can be said about the distance placed between the original Yiddish and its declension by the author himself, inspired as he was? When I went back to work, that is, to the rewriting of this translation in the so-called “father’s tongue,” the tate loshen,” I was at once conscious of the requirements of fidelity to the first and to the second originals – as to the First and the Second Temples – and overwhelmed by a certain opacity that had made the text more impenetrable in the process of translation. The “father’s tongue” was now an encrypted tongue/a coded language. As such, it demanded interpretation as well as translation. How should I then, under threat of a double betrayal, obey the imperative of a double fidelity?

I decided to do it, so I assume after the fact that in principle, in the case of this translation – if not translation in general – I considered that the work of interpretation, with Moishé’s connivance, would assure fidelity to the Yiddish text. Week after week we unstitched, turned and hemmed each line. At Moishé’s side I learned the work of alteration, then of tailoring, and little by little the rudiments of haute couture. The angle and appearance, the finishing touches of every turn, every restitching, every mending and hidden seam were validated by Moishé. As he wrote, “I knew that Isabelle would understand me, for if necessary I could explain it to her in Yiddish.” It was this interpretative stage that to my mind established a legitimate basis for fidelity to the original Yiddish text.

In this work of writing, I had been attentive to what we were doing to the French. I had even sometimes been troubled by the exoticism, by the yiddishkayt, indeed the barbarisms that studded the language. It was in a final stage implemented under the friendly and sometimes strict impetus of our editor, Martine Lévy, that I understood that the salt of this text and the sense of this life required such rude treatment of the French. I still regret having betrayed generations of immigrant garment workers from Eastern Europe by failing to keep the word “patronage” on the pretext that in French we say “patron” to designate the maquette made from paper or sailcloth/cloth in preparation for the definitive cutting of a garment. Alone against the sectarians of Larousse and Littré, against Bon Usage, our fathers and grandfathers, craftsmen and tailors, cutters and designers, calmly continued to design/draw their “patronages.”

Just as transmission demands forms of betrayal, fidelity implies a certain rudeness, and God knows that in France as much as in the French language, the elegance of this rudeness is a high wire onto which the translator steps at some risk. Also out of place is the plethora of adverbs in a language in which repetition, hyperbole and impropriety are the marks of the uneducated or the foreigner. Out of place like the stubbornness of that Ashkenazi grandma, in the film Family Small Talk by the late Hélène Lapiower, who insists to her granddaughter’s Italian fiancé that pasta is in fact eaten cooked and not half-raw. Out of place, then, like bad taste. One small sign, among the first echoes of captivated readers, allowed me to hope that perhaps I had not entirely failed to attain a certain balance in maneuvering that high wire, since the goal of the tightrope walker is not topographical but kinetic. My friend, the Yiddish actor Rafael Goldwaser, asked to read a few excerpts from Moishé’s book for a presentation of Yiddish culture. What else are you going to read? I asked him. “A littke from Singer, a little from Manger, and a little from your father,” he answered.

What happened, after all, in this translation adventure, to her father’s daughter? It is not insignificant to write as a translator, let us say a particular translator, the memoirs of one’s author, of the author of one’s days. Double betrayal, double fidelity, these are also the lines of force of our relation to history, to our history. Why double? Why not make it simpler? Because our history is not only a continuum of events bound together by chains of causality. It is also the result of the rigorous and patient work of elaborations, of reconstructions, of representations. Nourished by family speech, leaning on my father’s narrative/story, plunged into my own internal questions, I explored the traceries of this history in the course of retracing our steps in Lithuania, where I made a film with Michel Grosman: a reflection on Yiddish, its flamboyance, its denial, its destructions, its persistence. To have the chance to rewrite a book written in “one’s father’s tongue,” is to be able to fashion, to trim this fabric of representations by attempting to piece together what I am from what we were, and to reweave thread by thread a threadbare, torn and crumpled cloth, like the reverse of the ripped mourning garment. Darning, patching, mending this history allowed me to take up the thread that bound me, not in the abstract to earlier generations, but in a very concrete way to Méré-Hayé in particular, to Tsivi and Aaron in particular, to Yitshak, to Haye-Dvoyre, to Hassye-Rivke and to Baruch in particular, so that in the end they inhabit me without haunting me. For everything in this translation was utterly particular.