Background
Hoffman was born in Łódź, Poland to a Yiddish-speaking family. While she was a child, her father was sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia, accompanied by Hoffman and her mother.
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Miriam Hoffman
Edit ProfileEducation
In 1957 finished the Jewish Teacher"s Seminary with a Bachelor in pedagogy.
Career
After a difficult passage through several other countries, the family arrived in the United States during 1949. In the 1970s taught Yiddish at the University of Tel-Aviv, Israel. Received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Miami, cum laude in 1981.
An Master of Arts from Columbia University in 1983.
From 1991-1994 taught Yiddish and Yiddish Dramatic Arts at Oxford University Summer Program. Foreign the last 20 years, columnist and feature writer for the Jewish Forward, where she has published over two thousand articles
Also edited a monthly literary supplement for the Jewish Forward. Y. M. Hoffman has lectured all over the world, topics include: "Yiddish language and Folklore, Yiddish Theater and Film", "The unpublished diary of a Jewish Soldier in the First World War," "Hebrew vs Yiddish," Chaim Grade"s "Deciphering a Seminal Masterpiece," "Life in a Doctorate.P. Camp in Germany (displaced persons - saving remnants of the Holocaust)" (1946–1949), also a collection of Songs in four languages, (Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and Polish) which was written down in the Doctorate.P. Camp in Ulm, Germany by the then ten-year-old Miriam, and brought to America in 1950, now at the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
She is fluent in Yiddish and Hebrew, and has a speaking knowledge of Russian, Polish and some German.
Achievements
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In 1992 she won the Israeli equivalent of a Tony Award for her English-to-Yiddish translation of Neil Simon"s The Sunshine Boys. Fellowship award from the Holocaust memorial Foundation, literary awards from the National Foundation for Jewish culture and the New School for Social Research. Published in "Di Goldene Keyt," literary magazine in Israel - a scholarly work on - "Łódź - Yiddish dialect." Winner of the Dora Teitelbaum Foundation for a literary work, published "Memory and Memorial," in the Yivo Bleter Publication.
