The Shmooze talks with Yiddish professor and translator Jessica Kirzane, a three-time alumna of the Yiddish Book Center, about the recent publication of her translation of Miriam Karpilove's "Diary of a Lonely Girl, Or the Battle against Free Love," first published serially in the Yiddish daily newspaper "Di varhayt" in 1916–18. Jessica began working on this translation in 2017 as a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. The novel, framed from the point of view of a diarist writing in first-person about her own love life, explores issues of women's empowerment and disempowerment around sexuality and politics and offers a snarky, melodramatic criticism of radical leftist immigrant youth culture in early twentieth-century New York.

Episode 0249

March 1, 2020

Yiddish Book Center

Amherst, Massachusetts