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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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Rahm Emanuel: Democrats who support Israel can still lead the party to the White House
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Pausing as he looked out at the packed hall at Tel Aviv University, Rahm Emanuel offered his audience a warning about what he was about to say.
“Hold your applause, because you may not like this,” he said, before laying out his proposal for U.S. sanctions targeting Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians and property, Israeli officials who voice support for that violence, and companies and banks that support “illegal settlements.”
The crowd applauded anyway — three separate times.
Under a 2017 law, Israel bars foreign nationals who publicly call for boycotts of Israel or its settlements from entering the country. Emanuel issued his call for sanctions from a stage in Tel Aviv, a measure of how far Democratic politics on Israel have shifted since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Widely viewed as a possible contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, Emanuel, a former congressman, White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor and U.S. ambassador to Japan, and one of the most prominent Jewish figures in American politics, arrived in Israel on Sunday. His speech Wednesday afternoon, billed as “An Honest Conversation: The U.S.-Israel Relationship, Where It Stands Today and The Road Ahead,” was the keynote of the visit, and was meant to signal the need for a “fundamentally new and different approach” to the U.S.-Israel alliance, as he put it.
Whether Emanuel’s critique will land with the Israeli establishment, or with the ruling coalition, remains to be seen. Emanuel made a point of avoiding Israel’s elected officials during his visit, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he did not want to interfere with elections set for the fall. He did meet with President Isaac Herzog, who is appointed by the government, as well as visit hospitals in Tel Aviv and Nablus that partner with each other.
But it was clear that it was resonating with attendees. Moti Porath told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he believed Emanuel correctly diagnosed the ailment at the heart of the Israeli government, a leader who has become an outcast abroad but remains too skilled a politician to easily dislodge.
Porath, who splits his time between Newton, Massachusetts, and Tel Aviv, and who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the same time as Netanyahu, said he recognizes the prime minister as a singularly talented political operator. “He’s a fantastic politician,” Porath said. “Maybe he’s a manipulator.”
To the attendees who spoke with JTA, Emanuel’s message was not anti-Israel but pro-Israel, in Porath’s telling, what a good friend is obligated to do when the other is acting out of line. Emanuel put it similarly from the stage, “True friends tell each other the truth.”
Porath said he hopes the United States and Israel can once again find “a common political vision,” but that doing so will require tough love from America’s next president.
The event was hosted by Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of the United States and moderated by its founding director, Yoav Fromer, alongside Yael Sternhell, the professor who heads the university’s American studies program. Organizers solicited questions from students in advance and said more than 100 were submitted.
But with a university audience likely to skew liberal, attendee Yoam Barash said the program would have benefited from a right-wing voice to push back on Emanuel’s comments, since most Israeli voters lean right. A February poll by the Midgam Institute for Israel’s Channel 12 news found 68% of veteran voters and 75% of those voting for the first time identify as right-wing. “Why didn’t they bring somebody from the right?” Barash asked.
Barash is the uncle of Daniel Barash, a managing director at the public affairs firm SKDK who helped organize the event He attended with Hannah Winkler, a friend from his army days and now a doctor in the Tel Aviv area. She said she pins her hope not on the U.S.-Israel alliance but on a left-wing victory in the upcoming elections. “Without that, I have no hope,” she said.
Told that some attendees had wanted a more politically diverse lineup, Fromer defended the format. “This is academia,” he said. “The goals here are very different than they would be on a political panel.”
At the same time, Fromer echoed the attendees’ view that Emanuel’s message was that of a friend rather than an adversary. “To say to someone, look, I’m trying to save you, if you don’t change your behavior, you’re going to self-destruct — that’s someone who cares,” he said.
The stakes, in his telling, are high for Israel and for the university. “Israelis have become pariahs. We used to be admired, the most admired,” he said, echoing Emanuel’s own warning from the stage that Israel’s leadership has turned it into a “territorial pariah.”
The damage is not merely reputational, he argued. “It’s not just feeling bad. It has practical implications,” he said, speculating about investment and capital that will stop flowing, students and tourists who will stop coming, Israelis who will lose their jobs.
During the anti-Israel protests that swept U.S. campuses in 2023 and 2024, ties with Israeli universities, including Tel Aviv University, were frequent targets of divestment demands. Emanuel himself warned in his speech that Israel’s scientists face exclusion from international research networks and that its artists and academics are being shut out of exhibits and conferences.
Inside the hall, at least, the message was received. “Most of the people in this room are quite sympathetic to what you have to say,” Barash told Emanuel on stage. “That is not the case across Israel.”
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Synagogue targeted by picketers inspires Ann Arbor ordinance to protect houses of worship
Ann Arbor, Michigan has become the latest city to pass legislation aimed at protecting houses of worship from protests, echoing similar policies passed by New York and proposed by California earlier this year.
But while New York and California introduced such legislation in response to occasional anti-Israel protests outside synagogues, Ann Arbor has been home to the persistent and brazen protest of a Holocaust denier who shows up to picket the same congregation every week on Shabbat.
While synagogue leaders are moved by the city council’s gesture, they don’t expect the protests to end anytime soon.
“The significance of the resolution is that a city council in a highly progressive city had the bravery to call out the antisemitism of Jew haters,” said Rabbi Nadav Caine, the spiritual leader of Ann Arbor’s Beth Israel Congregation. And that’s no small thing.
For the past 23 years, a small group of protesters have gathered outside Beth Israel on Shabbat carrying signs with hateful slogans like “Jewish Power Corrupts,” “No More Holocaust Movies” and “Antisemitism is earned, never given.”
Partly in response to those decades of hateful demonstrations, the Ann Arbor City Council on Monday unanimously passed a resolution directing the city manager to develop a plan for protecting houses of worship during protests, which can include protest-free buffer zones.
Jerry Sorokin, executive director of Beth Israel, expressed gratitude for the city council’s sentiment — though he also believes the measures “won’t make any real difference.”
The protesters carry “incredibly offensive” signs, Sorokin said. But they also stay off synagogue property and don’t interfere with congregants trying to enter, he said, making it unlikely that a security perimeter would affect their demonstrations.
“They’ve found out exactly what the limits of their legal rights are in terms of what they can say, where they can say it, and how they can interact with the public, and they push it right to the limit without going over,” Sorokin said.
A court agreed. In 2019, a congregant and local Holocaust survivor lost a lawsuit against the Beth Israel protesters and the city of Ann Arbor, with a court concluding that the protesters were engaging in protected speech.
Buffer zones across the country
The measure in Ann Arbor reflects a broader national debate about balancing protesters’ free speech rights with worshippers’ ability to safely access religious services, as New York and California have also moved to enact buffer zones outside houses of worship.
In May, demonstrators outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan chanted “We don’t want no Zionists here” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” outside an event promoting real estate sales in Israel and the West Bank. New York lawmakers approved a 50-foot security buffer around houses of worship proposed by Gov. Kathy Hochul. Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani allowed a bill that requires the New York City Police to develop a plan for managing protests at houses of worship.
In Los Angeles, protesters targeting Wilshire Boulevard Temple for hosting speakers affiliated with the Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems prompted California lawmakers to introduce a buffer-zone bill that would make it a crime to approach a person within 100 feet of a synagogue in order to hand out a leaflet, hold a sign, or “engage in oral protest.” First-time offenders would face up to six months in jail.
At the federal level, U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York introduced the SACRED Act, which would make it a federal crime to intimidate, obstruct or harass people within 100 feet of a house of worship.
But those proposals all face the same constitutional constraint: They can regulate how protests are conducted, but not the viewpoints being expressed. There’s no legal remedy to the offensive messages painted on placards and yelled at passing drivers, Sorokin said.
“I think what the city council did is laudable, and it is reassuring to us that they’re showing support for freedom of worship and for access to synagogues, churches, and mosques,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to change what goes on outside our building every Saturday.”
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In the world of Jewish translators, she was known as a mentor, a friend and a literary giant
Barbara Harshav, widely considered one of the most important translators of Jewish literature of our time, passed away June 24 at age 85. She translated from French, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish — and won acclaim from scholars and fellow translators for her range and high standards. Her curiosity and willingness to tackle difficult material were legendary.
“Few people would be able to and feel comfortable translating from French and German alongside Hebrew and Yiddish,” Shachar Pinsker, professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at The University of Michigan, wrote in an email.
She translated giants, including Shmuel Yosef Agnon, winner of the Nobel Prize; Avrom Sutzkever, the towering Yiddish poet; the Israeli novelist Meir Shalev; and the beloved poet Yehuda Amichai. But she was also loved as a mentor and friend to scholars and translators of several generations.
“I knew Bobbi Harshav through reading her translations before I met her for the first time, when I helped her carry a suitcase to a room in Berkeley’s Bancroft Hotel in 2005,” Pinsker recalled. “Since then, we have seen each other in Ann Arbor, Tel Aviv, New York and Boston. It was always a thrill to meet her, speak and correspond with her, and learn from her.”
Her personality was reflected in the books she translated.
“Bobbi had a fierce sense of curiosity and independence that carried her forward. I can’t think of anyone else who would translate the Palestinian author Emile Habibi’s essay ‘Your Holocaust and our Catastrophe,’ alongside poetry by Abraham Sutzkever, Yehuda Amichai, the best of American Yiddish poetry, as well as novels, stories, and plays by Hanoch Levin, Yoram Kaniuk, Yehudit Hendel, Yehudit Kazir, and Leah Goldberg,” Pinsker wrote.
Harshav also co-translated many books with her late husband, Benjamin Harshav, including Sing Stranger: A Century of American Yiddish Poetry.
Her translations included some of the most challenging books in recent Jewish literature, like Agnon’s fiction. Made up of layers upon layers, with allusions to Jewish texts everywhere, it is notoriously challenging, if not impossible, to translate.
“Bobbi took on the heroic task of translating S.Y. Agnon’s Tmol Shilshom (“Only Yesterday”), which many considered untranslatable, and although she was aware of the limitations of Agnon in English, she proved them wrong,” Pinsker recalled.
“Perhaps the main thing about this translation is that Bobbi captured Agnon’s sense of irony, because of her own smart and wicked sense of humor.”
On social media, scholars mourned this loss.
“I just read her translation of The Loves of Judith. It’s a stunning and masterful translation of a book that plays with languages, gender, timelines and so much,” Shayna Weiss, Senior Associate Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis, wrote. “What a loss.”
Weiss, in an email, shared that she was reading Harshav’s translation of Shalev’s book because she is speaking at a film festival that is showing For the Love of a Woman, a new film based on this book.
Bobbi, as she was known, was famous inside translation circles for her warmth and kindness to other translators, including invitations to live in her home, rent-free, while translating.
She was especially encouraging to beginners.
When I was a graduate student, she emailed me out of the blue and invited me to participate in a panel at the American Literary Translators Association conference, which was meeting that year in Chicago. I knew no one there, and made a friend — the Yiddish translator Leah Zazulyer, also gone now — while waiting for Bobbi to show up.
I did not know it then, but Bobbi was a celebrity in that conference; she was a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Later she would become the only Hebrew or Yiddish translator in history to win the PEN/ Manheim medal.
The Manheim medal is awarded every three years for lifetime achievement in literary translation. Bernard Malamud and Gay Talese donated the initial funding for the award; it received additional support from the family and friends of Ralph Manheim, the American translator of Mein Kampf, who died in 1992, and it is now named after him.
The medal recognizes translators “whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of their work.” Prior winners include Gregory Rabassa, translator of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which Gabriel García Márquez famously declared superior to his original, and Edith Grossman, translator of Don Quixote and author of the influential book Why Translation Matters.
Harshav published more than 40 books of translation including works of poetry, drama, fiction, philosophy, economics, sociology and history.
“I know that the Manheim Lifetime Achievement medal acknowledges the full range of Barbara’s work, including her translations from French and German, but the fact that this award casts the spotlight on Hebrew and Yiddish translation, languages that often are overlooked in the world literary economy, is just monumental,” translator, scholar, and Oxford professor Adriana X. Jacobs said when Harshav won the medal.
“In all her translations, Barbara’s voice comes across so clearly and distinctly, even as she is capturing the qualities unique to a specific writer. And what I mean is that when you read Barbara’s translations, her commitment to her choices is evident. And every time I have heard Barbara speak on translation, this has been confirmed,” Jacobs said. “She can tell you why she made one choice and not another, why she chose to translate a particular text and not another, and she always — always — stands by her work.”
Harshav’s comments on writing and translation sometimes made it to Twitter and other social media, like this snippet from her talk at Davidson College: “Style is the morality of the mind. And obscurantism is sinful.”
She came of age in a time well before AI and before translation apps. Learning a language then was slow hard work. For French and German, she focused on basics, then read newspapers and novels.
“As for Hebrew, I started studying Jewish history and realized that I had a serious handicap because I did not know Hebrew at all, not the alphabet, nothing,” she told Rainer Schulte in Translation Review in 2012.
Unlike many Hebrew translators, Harshav came to the language relatively late, at 34.
“I literally fell in love with the language. There was the exhilarating feeling of learning a new language and a new alphabet at that age. It must have repeated the original childhood sense of learning to read, when the letters suddenly make sense and a new world is opened.” She learned Yiddish last.
Scholars and translators saw something distinctive in Bobbi Harshav’s work, in all four languages she translated from. In conversation, she often talked about translation quality; her goal was always excellence.
One reason for her excellence was that she was always reading. Another reason was her attitude, toward the text, and toward herself.
“I carry books all the time because you never know when the elevator will break down, and I am reading all the time,” she told Translation Review. “It is the element of play that is very important. Humility is also important, and the text is sacred. It is also true for performance. You have to have a kind of humility. I take what I do very seriously, but I do not take myself seriously.”
You can hear all of that in her translator’s note to Tmol Shilshom, or Only Yesterday, by Agnon. “If there is some other world, where translators can discuss ‘deviations’ with authors,” she wrote,” I hope Agnon will understand.”
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