Honey on the Page, a Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature, edited and translated by Miriam Udel, illustrated by Paula Cohen (NYU Press)
I had the pleasure of meeting from Miriam Udel at Tent, a wonderful program sponsored by PJ Library at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she shared her translations of Yiddish stories that have now been published as Honey on the Page, A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature, edited and translated by Miriam, illustrated by Paula Cohen and published by NYU Press. It’s the first comprehensive anthology of Yiddish children’s literature in English and it’s hard to imagine anyone bring more passion to this important project than Miriam, an associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where she teaches Yiddish language, literature, and culture.
Miriam holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations as well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and was ordained in 2019 as part of the first cohort of the Executive Ordination Track at Yeshivat Maharat, a program designed to bring qualified mid-career women into the Orthodox rabbinate. She is also the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience.
Miriam lives in Atlanta with her husband and their three boys where she enjoys weight-lifting, salsa, tap, hip hop ad reggaeton. Thanks, Miriam, for taking time to visit The Kids Are All write!
How did you decide on the title, Honey on the Page?
I wanted to evoke the custom of slathering honey onto a child’s first school primer to make learning sweet. In my own Jewish education, we were told about this custom at the start of Hebrew school, but chocolate pieces were substituted for honey. Just as the chocolate was meant to stand in for the messier honey, so too I hope my translations and relatively neat categorization scheme will stand in for the splendidly chaotic, multifarious Yiddish originals.
How long was your journey with this book? Can you tell us how long it took to evolve from idea to completion? What were the challenges, surprises, delights along the way?
This book took the satisfyingly Biblical term of seven years from inception to publication. Three very serendipitous things helped move it along. One was that in 2013, when I was just getting serious about this project, the Yiddish Book Center inaugurated its Translation Fellowship. I applied for the first cohort and suddenly had access to expert, detailed instruction from professional translators as well as a peer group of Yiddishists looking to cultivate the craft of translation. So I would gain the skills to actually write the book I was proposing.
Every spring, Emory brings one literary agent and one scholarly press editor to campus for talks and individual meetings with faculty. In 2015 (I think!), they brought Eric Zinner of NYU Press. By this time, my agent had already circulated a proposal to trade presses and children’s editors. Nobody was interested or really saw the project’s potential—except for Eric. It helped that NYU had published a successful anthology of American leftist and anarchist literature called Tales for Little Rebels, so they had a template in mind. But I was dead-set on creating a volume that would appeal to children as well as adults, with copious illustrations. I wanted full color! I wanted an illustrator! I sent a lot of proposals to a lot of foundations and potential sources of funding and heard many polite variations of “no.” An entire year of “no” while the translations were basically done and I was busy with other things.
Then, I taught for my third time at the TENT seminar for Jewish children’s authors and illustrators, and the inexorable drive of Jewish matchmaking took over. Novelist Joanne Levy nudged her friend Paula Cohen approach me because I had mentioned I was looking for an illustrator. Paula’s work is incredible: joyous, whimsical, engaging, but also very precise: every line is just where she wants it. She was willing to work in black and white (also in incredibly vivid, eye-popping color for the cover). Once the book went into production and I had found an illustrator that everyone could see we were lucky to get, then things started falling into place with very generous support from Emory’s Jewish Studies program and some additional funds from my graduate department at Harvard.
You arranged the stories thematically, from school days to holidays. Was that the plan from the start? Did the stories you found fall naturally into these themes or did you find yourself looking for stories that fit these themes?
I’m chortling as I read this question, thinking of the tag line, “Maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s Maybelline.” I considered several different methods for organizing what proved to be an overwhelming amount of material: by chronology, geography, age of the target reader, etc. Each of those would invite certain audiences and turn off others. Historians might love the chronological approach, and scholars probing pathways of literary influence might love a geographical one. But what seemed to best invite the attention of a wide readership was organizing the stories and poems by theme.
I was encouraged by the fact that many anthologies from the 20’s and 30’s, the period to which most of my selections date, were organized in a very particular arc from the most distinctively and particularly Jewish content to more universal themes. I decided to emulate this. I remember sitting on the sofa with index cards spread all around me with about fifteen different thematic categories and smaller, cut-up index cards with each individual entry. Of course I wanted each one to fit naturally into a thematic category, but there was lots of potential overlap and a couple that got shoe-horned in. I hope most of the placements feel “just right” though.
Is there a quixotic element to learning Yiddish and translating these stories so that they can live on for future generations? It takes enormous effort on your part, that of other Yiddish scholars, and the Yiddish Book Center to keep alive a language that doesn’t have a home of its own.
Look what the Jewish community has invested in fostering high-quality, engaging children’s literature today. Look how many representations there are, both in kid lit and work for adults, of the shtetl, and look how much is simply being imagined, sometimes clumsily, for want of the knowledge of Yiddish. Doing anything with Yiddish felt more quixotic when I started studying it almost twenty years ago. But today, there is such a well-developed institutional structure undergirding the “Yiddish renaissance.” There are so many young adults, millennials and Gen Z, who are learning Yiddish and creating new work and new modes of working with it.
The stories span from the 1910s to the 1970s. Do the stories end in the 1970s because people stopped writing stories in Yiddish in the 1970s? Do you think we will see people writing in Yiddish again?
People are writing in Yiddish right now, both in the Hasidic world and in the more secular one! There is a wonderful little press called Kinder-Loshn (Child’s Language) that is publishing bilingual versions of Yiddish stories old and new. Yiddish is an officially recognized and government-supported language in Sweden, so there are new TV shows and children’s books and radio plays being produced there in the mame-loshn (mother tongue). My friend Arun Viswanath recently published a translation of the first volume of Harry Potter into Yiddish.
Obviously, these projects are all swimming against the current of linguistic assimilation, but at this point, I wouldn’t bet against Yiddish.
A Yiddish typewriter at the Yiddish Book Center
How did you find these stories? Did you discover any of them as an undergraduate or when you were completing your Ph.D. at Harvard University?
One thing that I reflect on in the introduction to the book I’m writing now, a critical study of Yiddish children’s literature designed as a companion to Honey on the Page, is that my Yiddish education included NO children’s literature. When I studied Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic at earlier points in my life, kidlit was always part of the syllabus. It made me wonder whether there even WAS any Yiddish children’s literature out there, and the shock of finding it all sitting in plain sight (digitized even!) yet utterly neglected spurred me toward this project.
You are a rabbi in addition to being a professor, ordained at Yeshivat Maharat. What drew you to become a rabbi? Does being a rabbi lead you to seek stories with ethical and spiritual resonance as well as literary quality? Can you give examples of some of the stories that work for you on both levels and why?
The children’s literature that I include in the volume was a product of the Yiddish left, which understood itself to be broadly secularist. Authors’ attitudes ranged from Yiddishkeyt (Jewishness) is the ethical and aesthetic wellspring of our inspiration” to “all forms of religious expression are the opiate of the masses.” With the former group, I found it fascinating how invested they could be in telling tales that took traditional religious observance as a theme, such as the two Sabbath tales that open the book. I needed to figure this out so badly that I ended up exploring the topic in a couple of scholarly articles. I was also fascinated by the notable return to telling holiday tales in the 1950’s, when the Jewish liturgical year becomes a source of cultural preservation and consolidation after the disruption of the Holocaust.
How will you be using this book at Emory University, where you’re an associate professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture?
I will be using it this semester in my course on Children’s Literature and the Quest for Just Societies. I have been teaching my translations for about five years now, and it will be thrilling to be able to show my students nicely laid out book pages instead of just word processing documents that scream at the top “NOT FOR CIRCULATION. DO NOT SHARE.” I also teach courses focused on Jewish childhood and family life that will make use of some of these texts, as well as translations that ended up on the cutting room floor.
It was a joy meeting you and learning from you at TENT, the program at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst in 2019. I remember how proud you were of the book Good Night, Wind: A Yiddish Folktale by Linda Elovitz Marshall, because of the way Marshall found a contemporary way to bring a classic Yiddish tale to life. Can you tell us about the journey from the Yiddish story to Marshall’s retelling?
This is probably mostly Linda’s story to tell, but I was indeed quite thrilled when she used the story by Moyshe Kulbak “The Wind That Got Angry” as the basis for her beautiful Good Night, Wind. I had taught my translation and interpretation of the tale at YIVO in Winter 2015. She changed the second half of the plot a great deal, she said, because in contemporary children’s stories, children need to be the primary agents and heroes. So instead of having a single mother stand up to the angry wind for the sake of the children, she figures out how to have the children confront the wind themselves.
Good Night, Wind: A Yiddish Folktale Hardcover by Linda Elovitz Marshall, illustrated by Maelle Doliveux (Holiday House)
I was also especially gratified because she built my interpretation, that the blizzard the wind creates is the acting out of a tantrum, right into the retelling of the tale. As translators, we don’t always get to catch a glimpse of the bridges that we’ve built, but in this instance I did.
You’ve said that your three sons were a focus for the group. Do they have any favorites among the stories and do their favorites surprise you?
My older boys have particular appreciation for everything that rhymes because that’s where they see my hard work—or rather, they don’t see it but can intuit that it’s there. My preschooler loves all the funny ones, such as the couple Avrom and Mirtl, who allow their home to be cleaned out by thieves rather than either one caving and going downstairs to shut a door that wasn’t properly bolted on a windy night. He hasn’t heard all of them yet, but next week we’re going to rock his world with the calf that gets lost in a farmer’s beard.
Tell us about the companion book you are working on for Honey on the Page.
I am writing a book for grownups about why this corpus matters: how we cannot fully understand Jewish modernity until we understand the culture that Yiddish-speaking Jews were creating for their children. Moreover, I explore what a deeply feminist project it is to dig into the thought world that educators and parents, so many of whom were women, developed with and for the children in their care.
What would you like readers, young and old, to know about Honey on the Page?
This is a book for generations to share and talk about together. Kids will like some of it, adults will appreciate some of it—but the book really comes alive when it is shared. Part of the work I hope it does in the Jewish community is to empower and activate older generations as tellers of family tales.
Do you have any favorite Yiddish expressions or words to share?
I suppose it makes sense to share the expression “sweet as honey,” zis vi honik, and perhaps what we wish people at the start of any new endeavor or adventure: mitn rekhtn fus, or “on the right foot!”
Thank you so much for your time, Miriam! Is there anything you would like to add?
Since travel isn’t possible right now, I’m embarking on a virtual tour that includes lots of public events. I am trying to keep the list current on my website, miriamudel.com. I’d love to “visit” your community, whether to speak at a day school or Sunday school, to an adult ed audience or book club, or to craft intergenerational virtual events that people can participate in from anywhere. Thank you for such a wide-ranging and fun set of questions to tackle, Nancy!
So, nu, give Miriam a call! And in the meantime, visit her here:
On her website: miriamudel.com
At the Emory University website: german.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/udel-mirian.html
On Facebook: miriam.udel
On Twitter: @miriamudel
NYU Press: Honey on the Page
Yiddish Book Center Museum Store: Honey on the Page
Yiddish Book Center Museum Store: Harry Potter in Yiddish
Nancy at the Yiddish Book Center, attending the TENT program sponsored by PJ Library in 2019, where I had the pleasure of meeting and learning from Miriam Udel (and working on a picture book about Henrietta Szold, coming out in Fall 2021 from Creston Books/Lerner Books)