Aliza shevrin biography examples today

I am a performer of Sholom Aleichem. A musician has a score to read and perform from. An actor has a script to read and perform from.

Appearing in Yiddish in , Isaac Bashevis Singer ’s short story, “A Letter to Mama,” has never been published in English until now.

In both cases that performer interprets the script or score according to his or her artistic knowledge, background and the precedents of other artists. But he must always follow the original words or notes as written. And so it is with me. I slowly, word by word, painstakingly plow through the books and hope to come up with what sounds as if it were written in English but is clearly the work of the author writing in Yiddish.

My husband, also a native Yiddish speaker and himself a poet and novelist, is my in-house editor. My Yiddish is better than his and his English is better than mine.

Aliza Shevrin is the foremost translator of Sholem Aleichem, having translated eight other volumes of his fiction.

I do the first draft: looking up words in dictionaries, checking with other books and Yiddish speakers, etc. We do this several times as I put in corrections on the computer where I have done the first translation head-on. Then he reads each chapter aloud, while I scan the Yiddish to make sure it sounds the way I want it to.

This is how the final book evolves. I must say it gives me great creative pleasure. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in a Yiddish-speaking family. Not unlike Latino families today, my family were recent immigrants to America, as were all my relatives and neighbors. In addition to public schools, I attended after-school secular Jewish schools taught in Yiddish till the age of