Background
Barbara Harshav was born in 1940, in the United States.
(Provides information on the Yiddish language and literatu...)
Provides information on the Yiddish language and literature, describes poetic forms, and gathers poems in Yiddish and English by seven of the best Jewish American poets
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520048423/?tag=2022091-20
1986
(The extraordinary story of three men in the Jezreel Valle...)
The extraordinary story of three men in the Jezreel Valley and their love for Judith and her son, whom each man participates in raising as his own. When Judith arrives in a small, agricultural village in Palestine after World War II, she is the center of everyone's attention--especially Moshe, a widowed farmer obsessed with his dead wife and his lost braid of hair, which his mother cut off in childhood; Globerman, a coarse cattle dealer who loves women, money, and meat; and Jacob, a farmer who gives up his wife, the most beautiful woman in the village, to turn his energies toward raising canaries and wooing Judith with all his might. For ten years the three men strive to win Judith's exclusive love, but she will not agree to marry any one of them. In her eleventh year in the village she gives birth to a son named Zayde, who looks like all three men. All three consider him their son, and all three participate in raising him. Judith finally marries Moshe, but within a few weeks she is killed under a tree that collapses during a snowstorm. This extraordinary quasi-mythological tale is told many years later by an adult Zayde, as he learns the details of his mother's life over meals elaborately prepared for him by Jacob. A universal story of love and destiny, "The Loves of Judith" masterfully combines classic Israeli characters with magic realism, as cows, canaries, and crows all act as emissaries of fate, along with a homosexual Italian prisoner-of-war who knows all there is to know about love.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0880016353/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss ...)
Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss lycée, and lives a life governed by routine. One day, a chance encounter with a Portuguese woman inspires him to question his lifeand leads him to an extraordinary book that will open the possibility of changing it. Inspired by the words of Amadeu de Prado, a doctor whose intelligence and magnetism left a mark on everyone who met him and whose principles led him into a confrontation with Salazar’s dictatorship, Gergorius boards a train to Lisbon. As Gregorius becomes fascinated with unlocking the mystery of who Prado was, an extraordinary tale unfolds. Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss lycée, and lives a life governed by routine. One day, a chance encounter with a Portuguese woman inspires him to question his lifeand leads him to an extraordinary book that will open the possibility of changing it. Inspired by the words of Amadeu de Prado, a doctor whose intelligence and magnetism left a mark on everyone who met him and whose principles led him into a confrontation with Salazar’s dictatorship, Gergorius boards a train to Lisbon. As Gregorius becomes fascinated with unlocking the mystery of who Prado was, an extraordinary tale unfolds.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802143970/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(Trapped in the horrors of World War II, a woman and a chi...)
Trapped in the horrors of World War II, a woman and a child embark on a journey of survival in this page-turning true story that recalls the power and the poignancy of Schindlerâs List. Michael Stolowitzky, the only son of a wealthy Jewish family in Poland, was just three years old when war broke out and the family lost everything. His father, desperate to settle his business affairs, travels to France, leaving Michael in the care of his mother and Gertruda Bablinska, a Catholic nanny devoted to the family. When Michael's mother has a stroke, Gertruda promises the dying woman that she will make her way to Palestine and raise him as her own son. Written with the invaluable assistance of Michael, now seventy-two and living in New York City, GERTRUDAâS OATH re-creates Michael and Gertrudaâs amazing journey. Gripping vignettes bring to life the people who helped ensure their survival, including SS officer Karl Rink, who made it his mission to save Jews after his own Jewish wife was murdered; Rinkâs daughter, Helga, who escaped to a kibbutz, where she lived until her recent death; and the Jewish physician Dr. Berman, who aided Michael and Gertruda through the worst of times. GERTRUDAâS OATH is a story of extraordinary courage and moral strength in the face of horrific events. Like Schindlerâs List, it transcends history and religion to reveal the compassion and hope that miraculously thrives in a world immersed in war without end. From the Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385527195/?tag=2022091-20
2009
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069116312X/?tag=2022091-20
2016
(When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the nov...)
When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the novel Only Yesterday in 1945, it quickly became recognized as a major work of world literature, not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. The book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence? Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him. Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691181004/?tag=2022091-20
Barbara Harshav was born in 1940, in the United States.
Barbara studied at University of Wisconsin, University of California in Berkeley and in University of California in Los Angeles, where she did her graduate study.
Harshav's first work, American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, is a collaborative effort that was published in 1986. Three years later she solely translated The Court Jesters, Czech-Israeli diplomat and writer Avigdor Dagan’s novel about four Jewish prisoners who survive a Nazi concentration camp by serving as entertainers for the sadistic camp commander. Reviewing the work in the New York Times Book Review, Avery Rome remarked that this modern fairy tale that explores profound questions arising from the Holocaust was “translated with sensitivity.”
In 1991 Harshav again collaborated on translations, this time on A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose and Yehuda Amichai’s Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers: Recent Poems. The following year Closing the Sea, a debut collection of four novellas by Israeli writer Yehudit Katzir, was published. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Cathy A. Colman praised Harshav for her “flawless translation” of Katzir’s work, whose stories offer commentary on contemporary Israeli society.
In 1994 Harshav also collaborated on the translation and editing of Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994 and served in the same capacities for Simha Rotem’s Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter: The Past within Me. Rotem was among the Warsaw Jews who managed to evade the Nazis by fleeing through the sewers and finding safety in the houses of sympathizers and in the countryside.
In 1995 Harshav translated another work about the plight of Poles during World War II, Lucjan Dobroszycki’s Reptile Journalism: The Official Polish-Language Press under the Nazis.
Harshav is also the translator of Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Among her primary activity she held the positions of instructor in several universities, as well as assistant and associate professor, editor.
Now she is working as a freelance translator. Among Barbara Harshav's last translated books there can be named Snapshots by Michal Govrin and Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, And this is the Light by Lea Goldberg, which she translated in 2011.
Barbara Harshav, a translator of Hebrew and Yiddish literature received prestigious PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, given every three years to recognize an outstanding translator for lifetime achievement. Harshav is the first Hebrew or Yiddish translator to receive the award.
Harshav has translated giants of Hebrew literature including Shmuel Yosef Agnon, winner of the Nobel Prize, and Meir Shalev, a major voice in Israeli fiction. Her translation of Yoram Kaniuk’s “Between Life and Death,” an autobiographical novel about the last four months of the writer’s life, was a finalist for the 2017 PEN Translation Award.
Harshav has published over forty books of translation including works of poetry, drama, fiction, philosophy, economics, sociology, and history, from Hebrew, Yiddish, French and German.
Also among Harshav’s more widely known achievements is the editing and translation of Yitzhak Zuckerman’s A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
(Trapped in the horrors of World War II, a woman and a chi...)
2009(Provides information on the Yiddish language and literatu...)
1986(The extraordinary story of three men in the Jezreel Valle...)
1999(Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss ...)
2008(When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the nov...)
