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An afternoon with Shayna Maydele, possibly the most Jewish dog in New York
(New York Jewish Week) — In my decades as a journalist, I’ve interviewed some pretty powerful, important and, yes, even famous people. But never before have I been so excited — starstruck, even — to meet a subject, and this one wasn’t even human.
I was positively giddy to visit the Upper East Side home last week of Shayna Maydele, a small, white dog who has captured the hearts of thousands of adoring fans on Instagram. Shayna Maydele’s popularity isn’t just owing to her adorable punim — though her punim is 100% adorable, as as this committed fluffy-dog lover can attest. It’s also because her Instagram is filled with charming, authentic expressions of Jewish pride, as well as humorous takes on life in New York City.
Leaving aside the big question of whether or not a dog can be Jewish (I say yes!) — or even if owning a pet is a Jewish thing to do — every Friday, Shayna Maydele’s account features a heartwarming “Shabbat shalom” message. The Shabbat photos often include homemade challah, other times they might feature her “Papa,” or her owner’s dad. I always let out a squeal of delight when I see the posts, and I’m hardly alone: “I wake up each a [sic] Friday and await such good posts,” wrote one commenter on a Shabbat post earlier this month. “Shabbat Shalom, Shayna!”
“My Shabbat posts get the most likes out of everything,” Shayna Maydele’s owner, Heidi Silverstone, told me.
Since emerging on social media in 2019, Shayna Maydele (whose name means “beautiful girl” in Yiddish) has garnered nearly 9,000 (and counting) fans from all over the world — many of whom go beyond simply “liking” or commenting on a post. The Jewish National Fund, for example, has, unbidden, planted a tree in her honor; she also played an important role in the engagement of one couple who happened to meet her at a dog park. Shayna Maydele’s Shabbat messages have been shared by a wide variety of high-profile social media accounts, including Humans of Judaism, Jewish Memes Only and several of the New York Jewish Week’s partner sites, including Hey Alma and The Nosher. Her followers include Grammy-winning Jewish musician Joanie Leeds and Jewish comedian Hannah Einbender, the star of the HBO comedy “Hacks.”
It’s a pretty remarkable following considering Silverstone — who is also Shayna Maydele’s social media manager, if you will — doesn’t have any social media accounts of her own, nor did she set out to make her pup a star. It all started in June 2019, when Silverstone and her husband, Rob, flew to Arizona to pick up their puppy from the breeder. (Shayna is a coton de tulear, a breed made famous by Barbra Streisand, who notoriously cloned her pup. The breeder later told Silverstone she also sold Streisand her famous dogs. “I’m not sure if they’re related,” Silverstone said of their mutual pets, “but I can pretend they are!”)
So many friends and family members had wanted to see pictures of the new puppy, said Silverstone, that she figured it would be easier to set up an Instagram account. “I didn’t make it private — I figured nobody’s gonna know her,” she explained. “And then, all of a sudden, people were following.”
Shayna Maydele’s account began to really take off when the Jewish content started, which happened organically. “It wasn’t a conscious thing — it was Shabbos and I put a yarmulke on her head and said, ‘Shabbat Shalom,’ thinking I’m wishing my family and friends a Shabbat shalom.” Followers took notice. “People were liking it so much I thought, ‘OK, we’ll do a Shabbat shalom post every week.’” Other Jewish holidays soon followed.
Heidi Silverstone poses with her coton de tulear, Shayna Maydele, whom she got in June 2019. (New York Jewish Week)
“The Jewish thing is just normal — it’s a part of our life,” said Silverstone, who chatted with me in her kitchen as Shayna Maydele, sitting beneath the table, interjected with an occasional woof.
Silverstone and her spouse are members of Park Avenue Synagogue; while they used to attend Shabbat services regularly, these days they are more likely to stream them. The parlor floor of the family brownstone is filled with Jewish art and Judaica (as well as some cool New York City treasures, such as coasters inspired by subway tokens).
In one corner of the the kitchen, where Shayna Maydele’s dog food sat untouched, hangs a framed Passover bagels recipe, handwritten by Silverstone’s grandmother, as well as a drawing her son Max made as a child of the Torah and other Jewish ritual objects made of cheese. (Max is now 25 and a fourth-year cantorial student at the Jewish Theological Seminary.) Around the corner is a painting made by a Shayna Maydele fan, a beautifully rendered version of an Instagram post featuring her holding a tub of Temp-Tee Whipped Cream Cheese.
A lifetime of shul-going means that there are enough kippahs in the home for Shayna Maydele to rarely pose wearing the same one twice — Silverstone estimates that a basket in the corner of the dining room contains some 200 skullcaps in a variety of textures and colors. Silverstone makes an effort to coordinate Shayna Maydele’s kippah to other accouterments that may be in the weekly Shabbat photo; on the day of my visit, Silverstone selects an orange kippah to match a painted ceramic tzedakah box, one that Silverstone had previously gifted to her grandmother.
When it’s time for the photo shoot, Silverstone’s “assistant” — that’s Silverstone’s husband, Rob, who is vice president of finance at media company Dotdash Meredith — emerges from his upstairs office. I had been warned that dogs, like babies, are notoriously difficult photo subjects, but on that December afternoon — with Shayna Maydele placed atop a low table next to the tzedakah box, and with Rob deftly sticking his fingers in Shayna Maydele’s mouth to elicit a smile — the whole adorable thing is over in minutes.
These days, Silverstone typically posts three or four times a week to Shanya Maydele’s account. Though she has no formal media background — a former dental hygienist, she now works as a workshop instructor for an au pair program — Silverstone said she is coached by her son, Michael, 28, who, in addition to working at a tech company, has his own photography business.
In addition to the Jewish content, there is other shtick. My favorites are the “new business ventures” that feature the coton posing beside or atop something someone has discarded on the street. (In one recent example, Shayna Maydele is seen in front of a play kitchen. “Fine dining on the lovely streets of NYC,” the caption reads. “I will cook and serve delicious meals prepared in this top of the line toy kitchen. FREE dog hair in every bite!”)
“We have so much trash on the street,” Silverstone said. “What’s really funny is that people in New York get it — they know what it is. But I have followers from all over the world. So probably, when they come to the city, they’re going to be looking for the streets paved in garbage.”
But the Jewish posts seem to be the heart and soul of the account, and Silverstone said she is moved by the positive reaction she gets from Shayna Maydele’s followers, both Jewish and not. She makes a conscious effort to define Jewish terms and holidays so they are accessible to everyone: On Simchat Torah in October, a photo of Shanya Maydele posing with a stuffed Torah is accompanied by an explanation of the holiday.
Though Silverstone jokes she spends “too much time” on the account, it’s clear the family is getting just as much joy out of the process as Shayna Maydele’s followers get from the results. When she hears from followers who are inspired to light candles or do something Jewish, “I love that,” she said.
Considering the impetus of the account was simply to save some time, Silverstone seems overjoyed that Shayna Maydele’s account is helping people learn more about Judaism.
“I guess my goal is just to expand reach — and if her Jewish comments could soften anyone’s opinion on Judaism or get another ally, I think that’s a pretty good goal,” Silverstone said when pressed on her hopes for the account. “But I certainly didn’t go into it that way.”
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The post An afternoon with Shayna Maydele, possibly the most Jewish dog in New York appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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For poet Velvl Chernin, life is interwoven with the sword
אַז אַ פּאָעט באַטיטלט זײַן נײַ בוך „לעבן מיט אַ שװערד“ איז שׂכלדיק צו שטעלן צװײ פֿראַגעס: װעמענס לעבן, און װעלכע שװערד?
אין דער פּאָעזיע־קריטיק איז מען אָפֿט מאָל פֿאָרזיכטיק אַװעקצושטעלן אַ קלאָרן אונטערשײד צװישן דעם נאַראַטאָר פֿון די לידער, דאָס הײסט, דאָס קול, װאָס רעדט, און דעם פּאָעט אַלײן, דעם בעל־מחבר. דער נאַראַטאָר פֿון די לידער איז נישט גלאַט אַן אָפּשפּיגלונג פֿון דיכטער. (אַ באַרימטער בײַשפּיל: שעקספּירס סאָנעטן זײַנען נישט אַ פֿאַרצײכענונג פֿון זײַן ביאָגראַפֿיע, נאָר אַ נאַראַטיװ פֿון אַ פֿיקטיװן פּאַרשױן.)
מע קען אָבער אַ מאָל זײַן צו מדקדק וועגן דעם. אין דעם דאָזיקן בוך, איז קלאָר אַז דער הױפּט־נאַראַטאָר פֿון די לידער איז מער װײניקער דער זעלבער װאָס זײַן נאָמען געפֿינט זיך אױפֿן שער־בלאַט: װעלװל טשערנין, אַ באַקאַנטער פּאָעט, רעדאַקטאָר, אַרױסגעבער, און גרינדער פֿון זשורנאַל „ייִדישלאַנד“ װאָס װױנט כּמה יאָרן אין כּפֿר־אלדד, א קאָלאָניע אױפֿן מערבֿ־ברעג.
װי באַװוּסט איז ער אַ געבױרענער אינעם געוועזענעם סאָװעטן־פֿאַרבאַנד, געאַרבעט אין רעדאַקציע „סאָװעטיש הײמלאַנד,“ געװען (אומלעגאַל) דאָרטן אַקטיװ װי אַ ציוניסט, און דערנאָך עולה געװען אין 1990. דאָס דאָזיקע בוך איז זײַן זעכצנטע. קײן ביכל איז דאָס נישט; ס׳איז אַ װאָגיק באַנד פֿון 200 זײַטלעך. דער לעצטער אָפּטײל פֿון בוך נעמט אַרײַן געשליפֿענע, שאַרפֿע איבערזעצונגען פֿון פֿאַרשײדענע שפּראַכן, אַרײַנגערעכנט אוקראַיִניש, שפּאַניש, העברעיִש און רוסיש.
טשערנין, מיט אײן װאָרט, איז אַ פּאָעט אַ רעליגיעזער ציוניסט, אַ קאָלאָניסט אױפֿן מערבֿ־ברעג, און אַ כּלל־טוער אין דער ייִדישער ליטעראַרישער װעלט. ער פֿירט אױך אַן אינטערנאַצינאַל לעבן. אַ סך פֿון די דאָזיקע לידער טראָגן די נעמען פֿון אײראָפּעיִשע שטעט, און די באַציִונג צװישן אײראָפּע און ישׂראל, דורך די אױגן פֿון אַ רוסישן ייִד אַן עולה, גיט צו אַ פֿאַרשידן־מיניקײט צו דער זאַמלונג. אַזאַ, אין סך־הכּל, איז טשערנין, און אַזאַ איז דאָס „לעבן“ פֿון טיטל.
װאָס איז ער אױסן אין דעם בוך? מיט דעם דאַרף מען אָנקוקן די „שװערד“ פֿונעם טיטל. כאָטש מער װײניקער אַ דריטל פֿון בוך איז אָנגעשריבן געװאָרן נאָך פֿאַרן גורלדיקן ייִדישן יאָר תּשפּ״ג, און פֿאַרן כאַמאַס־אַטאַק פֿון זיבעטן אָקטאָבער, איז דער צענטער און אױסגאַנגפּונקט פֿונעם בוך, װי אַ גאַנצקײט, יענער אַטאַק, און װי אַזױ דער לירישער איך פֿונעם פּאָעט רעאַגירט דערױף.
לױט טשערנין איז דאָס לעבן איצט געקניפּט און געבונדן מיט דער שװערד. כאָטש ער פֿילט זיך געריסן, האַלט ער אױך אַז דאָס פּרוּװן פֿונאַנדערטײלן לעבן און שװער איז נאַיִװ.
און דו וועסט לעבן מיט דײַן שווערד, אויב דו וועסט לעבן.
אַלטערנאַטיוועס זײַנען וויזיעס, ניט מער.
ס׳איז צו געפֿערלעך צו אַ שלום חְנוניש שטרעבן.
דעם פֿאַקט דערווײַזן איז לעת־עתּה גאָר ניט שווער.
עס זײַנען קעגן דיר די הענט כּמעט פֿון אַלע.
עס מוז אויף אַלעמען זײַן דײַן ברוטאַלע האַנט.
די ווערטער זײַנען אַ נבֿואה אַ באַנאַלע,
וואָס ווערט מקוים, כאָטש דו קלאַפּסט זיך קאָפּ אין וואַנט.
בודאַפּעשט תּשפּ״ד
מע מוז זײַן ברוטאַל, לױט טשערנין. די שװערד װעט מען האַלטן נישט נאָר װי אַ דערװײַליקע נײטיקײט, נאָר אין אַ װיזיע פֿון אַחרית־הימים, װי ער רעכנט אױס אין זײַן ליד „גמר חתימה טובֿה“:
עס וואַרטן פֿאַרבלוטיקטע שווערדן
אויף ריינער ווי אמת נעילה
אין הימלען אויף ימען אויף ערדן
בלוט שפּריצט דורך און דורך די לידער. דאָס זײַנען אַװדאי די מחשבֿות פֿון אַ יחיד בימי מלחמה. דער ליריקער איז דאָך אַן אינדיװידועל, װיל מען הערן זײַנע געדאַנקען. אַ מלחמה־בוך אָן בלוט װאָלט נישט געװען אַקוראַט.
װידער קערט מען זיך צוריק צום טיטל. „לעבן מיט אַ שװערד“: איז נאָר פֿאַראַן אײן לעבן מיט אַ שװערד? װער געפֿינט זיך אױפֿן צװײטן עק שװערד?
מע זעט נישט און מע הערט נישט פֿון קרבנות, פֿון די פֿאַרשניטענע. דאָס װאָרט פּאַלעסטינער װערט דאָ נישט דערמאָנט, דאָס װאָרט „אַראַבער“ אױך נישט.
טשערנין קען מען פֿאַרגלײַכן מיט אַן אַנדער פּאָעט, אַ גדול פֿון אונדזער ליטעראַטור, װאָס האָט געהאַלטן פֿון ייִדישער סופּרעמאַטיע און פֿון אומגעצאַמטן כּוח פֿון ייִדישער שװערד פֿעסט אין דער האַנט קעגן גױשע שׂונאים. אורי צבֿי גרינבערג האָט אָבער בפֿירוש דערמאָנט די שׂונאים און געטײלט זיך מיט זײַן קלאָרער װיזיע פֿון דער װעלט. טשערנין בלײַבט אײַנגעשלאָסן אין זײַנע אײגענע בלוטיקע דלתּ אמות.
אַ ליריקער װאָס לאָזט אױס האַלב פֿון דער מלחמה באַגײט נישט נאָר אַ מאָראַלישע נאָר אױך אַן עסטעטישע עוולה. װעמען הרגעט די שװערד? פֿאַר װאָס זעט מען נישט די מתים אױף דער דאָזיקער קאַנװע פֿון קריג?
ס׳איז אַקוראַט און נײטיק אָנצורופֿן טשערנין בײַם נאָמען: אַ טאַלאַנטירטער פּאָעט, אַ געשיקטער איבערזעצער פֿון פֿיל שפּראַכן, אַ שטיצער און דערמעגלעכער פֿון דער הײַנטיקער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור — און אױך אַזאַ װאָס איז גרײט מקריבֿ צו זײַן יענעם.
עס שמעקט די לופֿט מיט הייסן שטויב,
וואָס בלײַבט דעם זיגער פֿון זײַן רויב.
איך האָב געזיגט. עס טוט מיר באַנג.
אַלץ ווערט צעשטערט. אַ שיינעם דאַנק.
דער דאָזיקער בולטער רמז אױף סוצקעװערס „װאָס װעט בלײַבן“ איז אױך אַן אָנװוּנק אױף דער מאָס פֿון דער טראַגעדיע װאָס דאָס ייִדישע פֿאָלק האָט אַדורכגעלעבט מיטן זיבעטן אָקטאָבער, און װאָס װערט דאָ פֿאַרטײַטשט פֿון טשערנין.
לױטן דאָזיקן פּאָעט איז דער מוסר־השׂכּל אַ בלוטיקער, אױף אײביק, כאָטש מיט ספֿקות און אינערלעכע קאָנפֿליקטן. ס׳איז אַ לירישער אַפּאָקאַליפּסיס אין אַ הערמעטישן קאַמער.
עס קען זײַן אַז מיט דעם שטעלט זיך פֿאָר די צוקונפֿט פֿון דער ייִדישער פּאָעזיע, בלוט און שװערד, בשעת אַלע אַלטערנאַטיװן װערן טאַקע צעשטערט. װעמען זאָל מען באַדאַנקען?
The post For poet Velvl Chernin, life is interwoven with the sword appeared first on The Forward.
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5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed
Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory in the Michigan Democratic primary means he’s going to have to work hard to persuade skeptical liberal Michigan voters.
I’m not from Michigan, but I am liberal. And I am skeptical.
I appreciate El-Sayed’s political skills and his relentless focus on the health and economic disparities that undermine the American dream for so many.
But while many Jewish Michiganders supported El-Sayed, his narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens has many other Michigan Democratic voters worried. It’s “ridiculous” that Democratic Jews wouldn’t vote for El-Sayed based on his positions on Israel, former Rep. Andy Levin told the Forward, but I’m not sure El-Sayed’s views on Israel are the main concern.
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told JTA, “he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism.”
Many of El-Sayed’s comments and actions during the primary cast that support into doubt. Here are the five questions I’d like to see Michiganders put to him:
You said, “Hurt people hurt people.” Do you also believe that enraged people hurt people?
After a man whose family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon attacked children at a West Bloomfield, Michigan synagogue, you said, “Hurt people hurt people.” You said you were explaining the act of terror, not excusing it. But we know too that incendiary rhetoric also foments violence. The Egyptian man who attacked Jews at a peaceful march in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2025 screamed anti-Israel political phrases and said he targeted the group because he believed they were “Zionists.” You have called Israel “evil” like Hamas, “bloodthirsty,” and you singled out AIPAC as uniquely nefarious and powerful among all influence groups in the country. Doesn’t such rhetoric endanger the lives of constituents you claim you want to protect? After extremists attempted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, you accused President Donald Trump of inciting them via tweet. Will you cool your own rhetoric?
Is there any circumstance you would vote to send military aid to Israel?
Oct. 7, 2023 was supposed to be an all-out war. Hamas along with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran and the Houthis discussed striking Israel in unison, and could have. In such a scenario, as in the October 1973 war, Israel would have faced many thousands of casualties if not an existential threat as it quickly exhausted its defensive shield. Now imagine you were in the Senate during such a scenario. Would you have voted to send help to an ally? You said you supported sending military aid to Ukraine when it faced invasion. Why not Israel in a similar scenario?
How would you work toward a two-state solution?
You told CNN that every definition of a Jewish state “ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.” You told The New Yorker that you support a two-state solution with equal rights and self-determination for Israeli Jews and Palestinians — which is a mainstream liberal Zionist position. So explain: What’s so illiberal about a Jewish-majority state you support? And do you believe in it enough to work toward one?
Is money really the only reason politicians and others support Israel?
You accused Israel’s supporters in Congress of being motivated solely by money. Is there really no other possible reason? Until Israel’s post-Oct. 7 destruction of Gaza, a majority of Americans and the vast majority of American Jews supported Israel. Couldn’t congressional support reflect their constituents’ support or their own religious or political beliefs? Could they believe in Jewish self-determination, especially post-Holocaust? Or is support for a Jewish state only a function of Jewish money (see #1)?
Which do you care about more, the Jewish vote, or Hasan Piker?
The Twitch streamer Hasan Piker said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. He called a Jewish man a “bloodthirsty violent pig dog.” You defended your appearance with Piker by saying you needed to reach his three million followers. I get that: Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris helped tank their campaigns by refusing to engage young voters wherever they could. But you continued to campaign with Piker, and refused to disavow his extreme rhetoric, saying you wouldn’t be distracted by “cancel culture.” No one is asking you to cancel him. But why won’t you, at least, confront him on his rhetoric?
There is, as you and countless pundits have pointed out, a lot at stake in this election. Right now too many American Jews feel that one of those things is their own safety. Please answer these questions, Dr. El-Sayed.
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The post 5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
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Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys!
If you have read any one of the at least 60 English translations of Homer’s Odyssey or have seen Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie, then you are probably aware that Odysseus leads a more active life than the average person. As if living through the Trojan War weren’t hard enough, he blinds the cyclops Polyphemus and gets cursed by Poseidon with epically bad weather. His men are regularly transformed into pigs, picked off by Laestrygonian giants, and drowned in storms. The nymph Calypso detains him on her island for seven years and forces him to be her lover, (although whether this counts as a hardship depends on your perspective). The man of twists and turns has seen a lot. But he probably never predicted his story would be translated into Yiddish. Or Ladino.
At first, the parallel lives of the two men who translated The Odyssey into Yiddish and Ladino sound like the makings of a sphinx’s riddle, or a cryptic prophecy from the Oracle at Delphi: both men would be called “Moshe”; both would be alive at the beginning of the Holocaust; only one would survive to the end. Their names were Moshe Leyb Pitshenik (1895 – 1941) of the Odiseye (אָדיסייע) and Moshe Ha-Elion (1925-2022) of La Odisea.
The two men never met, yet there are unexpected rhymes between the lives of the Moshes, as if their lives were composed in the same meter. Not even a photo survives of scholar, writer and translator Moshe Leyb Pitshenik, but the Congress for Jewish Culture records that he was born in Zlotshev, eastern Galicia, now Ukraine. He spent his whole life traveling various pathways to erudition. As a child, he attended a religious elementary school and a small synagogue study hall before working as a bank employee in Vienna. The corporate life must not have been for Pitshenik, for he soon moved back to Poland and enrolled in a teachers’ seminary. He spent the rest of his life as a teacher and director at the local Jewish high school in Loyvitsh (Łowicz), writing ferociously on the side.
His poems, articles, short stories, and translations appeared in publications in Krakow, Warsaw, Łodz, and Vilna. Occasionally he would publish under pen names like “A Zaytiker,” an outsider, and “Nekhed Mohel,” which translates to “the grandson of the mohel (ritual circumciser),” but sounds suspiciously like something else.
In 1937, he pulled off his translational tour de force: the Odiseye, so literally epic an achievement that he won an award from the Yiddish PEN Club, the Yiddish branch of the PEN international network with epicenters in Warsaw, Vilnius and New York City. In the book’s introduction, fellow poet and translator Shloyme Shaynberg gave Pitshenik a hearty mazal tov for “anchoring one of Homer’s magical ships on our shores.”
But the time to celebrate ran short. Just two years after the Odiseye’s publication, the Nazis invaded Poland, confining Pitshenik and thousands of other Jews in the Łowicz ghetto. He had been working on an original epic poem in ancient Greek at the time of the invasion. Had he been allowed to finish it, the poem would have been the first original ancient Greek epic to be published since the 5th century C.E. In 1941, he was led into the Kazimierz Forest and murdered, leaving the poem unfinished.
Pitshenik was already 30 years old when Moshe Ha-Elion, his Sephardic counterpart, was born in Thessaloniki in 1925. Like Pitshenik, Ha-Elion studied at a Jewish primary school before receiving a secular education, discovering The Iliad and The Odyssey in ancient Greek during junior high. Ha-Elion was 16 when the Nazis invaded Thessaloniki, he recounts in his oral history for the United States Holocaust Museum. Two years later, in 1943, Ha-Elion and his mother, sister, and grandparents boarded freight wagons believing that they would be resettled in Poland. But these wagons were headed for Auschwitz. On arrival, every member of Ha-Elion’s immediate family was sent to the gas chambers but him.
For the next 21 months, Ha-Elion labored in Auschwitz. Teaching became his lifeline: He gave Greek lessons to a Christian prisoner with special privileges in exchange for food. In 1945, as the Allies approached, the Nazis transferred Ha-Elion and thousands of other prisoners to concentration camps in Austria. The hunger, Ha-Elion recalled later in an interview with El Mundo, was so unbearable that he ate train coal to survive.
After the liberation of the camps, Ha-Elion entered mandatory Palestine on a refugee ship. He fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Humanities at the University of Tel Aviv. Like Pitshenik, he spent the rest of his life stirring up a tornado of writing across genres: He wrote a memoir of his time in the camps, a book of autobiographical poems in Ladino entitled En Los Kampos de la Muerte, or In the Death Camps, and even music to accompany one of these poems, La Djovenika al Lager (The Young Girl in the Lager), about the murder of his sister Nina.
But it was not until the end of his life that Ha-Elion undertook his translation of The Odyssey. When Ha-Elion was 90, he and the Israeli poet Avner Peretz published a Hebrew and Ladino dual translation of The Odyssey. He even managed to keep the poem in dactylic hexameter, a line-for-line Ladino mirror of the ancient Greek epic.
There are strange reflections of each Moshe in the Odysseys that they translated. For Pitshenik, the story seems omen-like: In the poem’s first line, Pitshenik translates the first adjective to describe Odysseus, polútropon, as the Yiddish word farvoglt, or “far from home.” This is unusual. English translators usually style Odysseus as “cunning” or a “man of twists and turns” or just downright “complicated.” It is as if Pitshenik read the signs of his own coming displacement in Odysseus before he read them in himself. But the translation’s strange prescience deepens just a few words later. Odysseus, Pitshenik says, participated in the “khurboynes” of holy Troy. At the time Pitshenik wrote this, a “khurbn” meant a total, cataclysmic destruction. It was reserved to describe horrors like the destruction of the first and second Temples and pogroms in Russia during World War I. But Pitshenik could not have known then that the word “Khurbn” would one day be used as a metonym for the approaching Holocaust. In Pitshenik’s translation, far-from-home Odysseus would survive a “khurbn” and find his way back. But Pitshenik himself never did.
For Ha-Elion, The Odyssey is like another form of autobiography. Like Odysseus, he was flung far from home by war, and spent the rest of his life trying to find his way home — or some place that felt like it. If translation is the process of rendering something foreign into something familiar, then perhaps translation is an attempt at homecoming in itself. Pitshenik and Ha-Elion never returned to their homes again after the War. But in the Odiseye and La Odisea, a piece of home survives. And it sounds like this:
Kontame, Muza, del ombre astuto…
O Muze! Bazing mir di maysim fun farvogltn gvir…
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns!
The post Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys! appeared first on The Forward.
