On the deserted city streets, the protagonist meets an acquaintance, an elderly man who wanders desperately, trying and failing to find a doctor for his wife. The Nazi army hasn’t yet occupied the city the aerial bombardment targets in particular the Jewish neighborhoods. Only days ago, with the German invasion of Poland, World War II has begun. And so The Family Moskat has two endings, one for its Yiddish readers, and another for all the others. Back in the ’50s, following a request from his editors abroad, the author decided to simplify the official English edition, which he supervised. I translated the final chapter, found only in the original edition. The novel was published serially, in Yiddish, by the New York paper Forverts. I translated the final chapter of The Family Muskat (yes, with a “u”) because it’s left out of the Italian edition. Of progress, they say, “A kick in the butt can still be a step ahead.” Their proverbs are similarly sarcastic: “It’s good learning to shave on someone else’s face.” They have the same numbers of beggars and superstitions, and both are practiced in poverty, emigration, and theater. That’s why they’re fast, their words cut short, good for clearing paths through the shouting. Yiddish is similar to my own Neapolitan–both are the tongues of crowds in tight quarters. And so I find myself leafing through the pages of a literature that is now nearly unknown, and almost never translated. Of the languages I’ve come close to, I’ve learned to read Yiddish most quickly. I managed to find a Yiddish textbook as well as a pair of Yiddish-English dictionaries. The infrastructure of its grammar is German it is written in Hebrew characters, and read from right to left. I’ve learned Yiddish, a language once spoken by eleven million Jews in Eastern Europe, fallen silent in their destruction. This letter could be sent to very few people, and I’m one. If you decide to accept our proposal, we’ll send you photocopies of the Yiddish stories of Israel Joshua Singer…” We are aware of your love for Yiddish literature, and of your translation of the final chapter of The Family Muskat, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. We would also entrust you with the translation and editing of the works selected. We would thus like to entrust to you the task of choosing from Singer’s extensive corpus those stories you feel to be most interesting. Our press is planning a select edition of the Yiddish writings of this author, in order to make his work available to Italian readers for the first time. “As you are no doubt aware, as of 2014 the works of Israel Joshua Singer–the older brother of Nobel Prize Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer–enter the public domain.
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