A new piece of academic scholarship co-authored by Dr. Beatrice Waterhouse, visiting assistant professor of sociology at Hastings College, has been published in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.
The article, titled “Restoring the Canon with New Translations of Yiddish Women Writers,” was co-authored alongside Na’amit Sturm Nagel, a doctoral candidate at UC Irvine.
Because Yiddish literary scholarship relies heavily on English translations, generations of female writers were excluded from critical discussion simply because their work remained untranslated. Waterhouse and Sturm Nagel explore how a recent wave of modern translations is breaking down those longstanding barriers, elevating voices that enrich and broaden how scholars view Yiddish literature.
By analyzing six recently translated works — including prose by Frume Halpern, Yenta Mash, Fradl Shtok, Miriam Karpilove, Anna Margolin, and Kadya Molodovsky — the article highlights how translators are bringing diverse perspectives on female fantasy, imagination, and immigration and refugee experiences to English-speaking audiences.
“In their pages, women are the dreamers who think, write and will their dreams into existence, or live within their fantasies when their realities become too harsh to bear,” the authors note in the article’s abstract.
By making these rich depictions of women’s inner lives accessible to contemporary readers, Waterhouse and Sturm Nagel demonstrate how modern translation efforts are redefining critical appraisal of the field.
The full article is accessible online through Project MUSE at muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/997633.
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