Immigration
Immigration
Written by: Isaac Bashevis Singer
Publication: YIDDISH BOOK CENTER
Translated by: the author and an uncredited collaborator
Published: Spring 2020
Part of issue number: Translation 2020
saac Bashevis Singer described his arrival in America on May 1, 1935, several times over—in the third volume of his fictionalized memoir, Gloybn un tsveyfl (Faith and Doubt, 1978), which was translated into English as Lost in America (1981) and incorporated into the three-volume Love and Exile (1985), as well as in two articles for the New York Times: “When the Old World Came to Sea Gate” (Jan. 2, 1972) and “Greenhorn in Sea Gate” (Nov. 3, 1985). As with any artist of variations, each version reveals a different aspect of Singer’s perspective on coming to America as an immigrant.
The following undated version of Singer’s arrival myth was translated in his lifetime, possibly drafted as an introduction to Lost in America. The original manuscript includes both corrections written in Singer’s hand and additional unidentified handwritten notes. It appears to have been written later in Singer’s lifetime, likely in the early 1980s, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, when his perspective on literature was broader, more general, and reflected its role and function in the quickly globalizing world. The piece is a reflection on New York in 1935—from the standpoint of nearly fifty years later, as modernity neared the age of the internet. And it insists that, in such a globalizing world, the search for authenticity in America is located not in exoticizing or coopting the culture of the other, but in acknowledging that being other is itself at the root of the American experience.
Singer was known for using young unexperienced people to help translate his work—but most of them didn’t even know Yiddish and, ultimately, worked more as stenographers than translators. Many of these people were volunteers, though some were paid by Singer for their work, and the final works were often signed, “Translated by the author and ________.” Singer never openly admitted that he was translating himself for decades, but he did address the issue in a Q&A session after a lecture in which he gave his advice on writing. The sound recording, which is stored at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, was made on January 29, 1964; in response to a question on translation, Singer answers: “I write everything in Yiddish, but I translate them myself lately. I used to have translators, but now I do a lot of the translation myself. I translate word by word, and I have a collaborator who helps me organize the sentences so that they should sound more English. Because in my case I know the words, but I don’t know the construction of the English sentence so well as a man who was born here.”
Singer’s conception of American culture and society was deeply influenced by the immigrant experience. From today’s perspective, which takes into account the fraught history of indigenous Americans as well as African Americans, his framing may appear to flatten what it means to be American. Yet it reflects the immigrant experience of a Jewish writer attempting to adapt his message to America’s majority culture—without leading to a loss of his own cultural identity. Singer was acutely aware that his image as a translated author was part of his appeal to American audiences and so incorporated his otherness into both his literary practice and his public persona. But he was also particular about how to translate himself into English—which is what gives much of his work in English its own voice despite being “translated” by so many different people with no knowledge of Yiddish.
—David Stromberg
I often feel that world literature has overlooked or utterly neglected the human experience connected with the process of immigration. Countless works were written about love in all its variations, but we haven’t yet seen a Flaubert, a Maupassant, a Tolstoy who has described the deep crisis of those who were forced to leave their country, their home, their mother tongue, and begin life anew in a strange land. This crisis is especially profound when the immigrant happens to be a writer. In my case, coming to New York in May 1935 gave me a shock I could never forget. I had the uncanny feeling that all my values, all my notions and emotions, were shattered. I was torn away from the roots without which literature cannot exist.