Rachel Mines book launch
July 16th, 2024

People’s Co-op Bookstore is hosting an event to celebrate the launch of Jonah Rosenfeld’s book, A Plague of Cholera and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press $44.95), containing short stories that were originally published in Yiddish in the 1920s, now translated to English by author Rachel Mines. Mines also translated Rosenfeld’s The Rivals and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press, 2020), which showcases Rosenfeld’s dark, Chekhovian style that foregrounds loneliness, social anxiety and people’s frustrated longing for meaningful relationships. The launch event will be held on July 27, 2024, from 7:00 pm onwards, at the People’s Co-op Bookstore on Commercial Drive.
In A Plague of Cholera, Rosenfeld explores the pressing issues of his time, including epidemics, differing social expectations for men and women, financial instability, and challenges to Jewish life at the beginning of the twentieth century. His themes resonate as strongly today as when the stories were first published. This new translation from the original Yiddish spans Rosenfeld’s career from 1924 to 1959 and is enriched with his biography and other writings.
By narrating the lives of impoverished and working-class Jews in Europe and urban North America, this book illuminates the secular, uniquely Yiddish challenges of its day. The collection provides a comprehensive, informed perspective from one of the most prominent writers of the Yiddish language, offering a deep insight into the socio-cultural landscape of the time.
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EVENT DETAILS
Date: July 27, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm
Location: People’s Co-op Bookstore, 1391 Commercial Dr., Vancouver
This is a FREE event open to the public.
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ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Born and raised in Vancouver, Rachel Mines received her Ph.D. in English from King’s College, University of London in 2000 as a specialist in Old English language and poetry but has since realized “the world is not crying out for specialists in Old English poetic meter.” She became a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow in 2016.
One of the impacts of the Holocaust is that it hastened the devolution of the Yiddish language. Approximately, 85 percent of the Jews who died in the Holocaust could speak Yiddish.
The monolingual stance of the Zionist movement further generated the modern dominance of Hebrew over Yiddish as the most common tongue of Israel. There are perhaps less than 2 million speakers of the Yiddish language left, whereas there were approximately 11-to-13 million Yiddish speakers prior to World War II.
The rich history of Yiddish literature is therefore in jeopardy, soon to be overlooked and ultimately forgotten, unless retrieval and revival actions are taken.
This has led to the creation of the loosely-knit Vancouver School of Yiddish translators that includes Rachel Mines, Seymour Levitan, Helen Mintz and Faith Jones.
“I guess you could also say I was attracted to Rosenfeld’s stories,” says Mines, “because his insights into the darker corners of human psychology appeal to some of my own ways of thinking as a child of survivors. I am interested in why people think and act the way they do, even when those thoughts and actions are harmful.”
Both of Mines’ parents were Holocaust survivors who spoke Yiddish at home.
Rachel Mines has been involved in Holocaust education and outreach in Skuodas, Lithuania, where her father was born and raised. Between 30% and 50% of the town’s population were Jewish prior to the Nazi occupation in June of 1941. Most of Skuodas’s Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The once thriving Jewish community has one cemetery memorial and three Holocaust memorials dedicated to the murdered Jews of Shkud (the town’s Yiddish name).
While an instructor at Langara College, Rachel Mines also created, coordinated and taught the “Writing Lives: The Holocaust Survivor Memoir Project.” This was a second-year, two-semester course that teamed Langara students with local Holocaust survivors to help them create written memoirs of their wartime experiences. The program has since been extended to First Nations survivors of residential schools.
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