People of the Book 101: Ruth Whitman, Translations & Transformations

by Jules Chametzky

In 1957, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts while working at Boston University, I took a summer course in Greek at Harvard, so that I could use the Widener Library the rest of the year and finish my dissertation. Next door to my class an eminent Classics professor named Cedric Whitman was teaching. That induced me to attend a poetry reading by Ruth Whitman, who had been married to him and bore his name, but, as it turned out when we met and talked, was now married to Firman Houghton (of the Houghton-Mifflin connection), with whom she was running a small literary magazine. I only learned she was Jewish when in 1966 I reviewed a volume of her translations of Yiddish poetry — which, in my view, she did very well — in The Nation. She was by then no longer with Houghton.

She was beautiful, ardent, and a fine poet. She did many more translations from the Yiddish besides publishing her own verse in English. I corresponded and caught glimpses of her occasionally while I was at Massachusetts Review, but she has passed away, in 1999 at the age of 77. Her coming from such mainstream marriages, and other similar connections, to Yiddish poetry makes me wonder about the many transformations, and Jewish self-discovery, as it were, among well-known and honored men and women poets (John Hollander and Adrienne Rich come to mind), and critics like Irving Howe (who co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg two significant volumes of Yiddish poets and fiction writers that remain the best in the field — especially Howe’s long introductions, which are must reading). Howe had made a name early in his career with volumes on Faulkner and Thomas Hardy, mainline, decidedly non-Jewish writers. Them, of course, there is Saul Bellow’s transformative translation — for him, for Singer, and for American letters — of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool.”

There are scores of lesser-known writers who have trod this path and who are more than just interesting footnotes to a trend. There is a serious social implication to all of these translators from one world to another and their intellectual and creative transformations. I think of former students and/or colleagues of mine: Marcia Falk, who did a splendid translation in book form of The Song of Songs, and now teaches mostly Jewish subjects; Jyl Felman, a fine gay Jewish poet and prose writer whose memoir, Cravings, is a delight about growing up Jewish in straight and middle-American Dayton, Ohio; Lev Raphael, another gay poet and story writer, author of Dancing on Tisha B’Av ( a collection of stories about gay life, Jewish and otherwise, that can still shock and inform me). Then there are my former colleagues, John Clayton, who began writing about the New Left, and Jay Neugeboren, who began as a wonderful writer about sports, now both prize-winners for their stories about Jewish American life.

There is also the amazing case of Aaron Lansky, a young graduate of the Yiddish program under Ruth Wisse in Montreal, whom I didn’t know when he appeared in my office a couple of decades ago. He came to ask me to sign a letter requesting money from a Jewish foundation. For what? To collect Yiddish language books that might be headed for oblivion and house them in Amherst. A Yiddish book collection? In Amherst of all places? Why? Well, he explained, because he liked the town, having graduated from Hampshire College a few years earlier. Okay, that was an honest response. I glanced at the letter, which already had Irving Howe and Saul Bellow as signators. In that case, why not? — I added my name, never expecting to see Lansky again.

Boy, was I wrong! From the humblest of beginnings, he was instrumental in creating a magnificent institution, the National Yiddish Book Center, getting land from Hampshire College, thousands of contributors, and a wonderful building, one of the most beautiful in town. It attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year, and oh yes, it has millions of books in its possession, saved from that threatening oblivion. Lansky richly deserved his MacArthur Fellowship, granted a few years ago. The Center also helps train and inspire whole new generations of young American Jews eager to connect with this part of their Jewish past. Lansky’s book, Outwitting History, about his zamling (collecting) is full of wonderful stories, too, and well worth reading. I am proud to have served twice on the Institute’s Board of Directors.

One of the earliest and best translators of Yiddish poetry is closest to my heart, however: Sarah Zweig Betsky, whose book, Onions and Cucumbers and Plums, 46 Yiddish poems (the title comes from a refrain in a poem by M.L. Halpern) she edited and translated during the Second World War as a Master’s thesis. It was published by Wayne State University Press in 1958, followed by a new edition in 1980. It is a beautifully designed book, with an impeccable selection of poets and poems, all in the original Hebrew lettering, also transliterated into Roman lettering, and then into English. Betsky’s story starts for me when in 19771 was asked to take over a graduate course at Yale in nineteenth century American literature and culture for a semester. Its regular professor, R.W.B. Lewis, had just won a National Book Award for his work on Edith Wharton and had taken off for Italy. Who can blame him. After my introductory lecture an attractive young woman student came up to me and said, “You look just like my uncle Sam.” That got my attention. She then told me about herself and her family. Her name was Ceil, she had come to graduate school at Yale from the Netherlands, where her mother and father Sarah and Seymour Betsky were professors at different Dutch universities. I remembered Leslie Fiedler telling me he couldn’t offer me a job in the English department at the University of Montana, where he was then chairman, because there were already too many Jews in the department, including Seymour Betsky. I refrained from telling Ceil that Fiedler story. She said that her mother was coming to visit her in a couple of weeks, and would I like to meet her? Absolutely — so there I was in a Yale dining hall, waiting for them to appear at the appointed day and hour. As they approached, I exclaimed to the mother, “You look just like my Aunt Sarah!” When it turned out her maiden name was Zweig, the deal was closed. It was also my mother’s (and her sister Sarah’s) maiden name. So, though her family came form Lvov gebernye (district) and my mother’s from the Lubline gebernye — which are actually not that far apart in southern Poland — we decided we must be cousins, however distant or close. We haven’t had our DNAs checked, but I still consider us family.

At least twice we met in Europe, early in 1978 in Germany, in our temporary house in Freiburg, where they arrived in a terrible storm and had a terrible marital quarrel; once in their home in the Netherlands, where they had a superb collection of Dutch genre paintings. I was there because in 1980 I was a finalist for the Chair in Amsterdam University, no doubt due to Sarah (who was not, however, a professor at Amsterdam). In the Betskys’ home town in Holland we even ate at a restaurant where the Crown Prince was wont to eat. In Freiburg I had told them about my first interview for a job with Fiedler. “Oh!” she exploded, “He’s such a ligner!” What? What exactly do you mean? Such a liar! You mean they weren’t picketed by the American Legion, or that there weren’t too many Jews in their department? She didn’t answer. Her bitter tone implied that there was more to it than that. I never fathomed the reasons, but suspect they felt the Betskys might have done better to stay in the States — although they had excellent positions and a good life, it seemed to me — if Leslie had been of more help to them. Or it may be due to her disapproval of the way the Fiedlers raised their many kids-the apparent chaos, the later pot-smoking scandal Leslie got into and out of in Buffalo. Just conjectures, from a distance, when it no longer matters. Seymour has since died. Sarah tried after that, unsuccessfully, to get a job and return to the United States. The last time I saw her, at an NBA Awards ceremony, Ceil worked in publishing in New York. Sarah and her excellent book and her work lives. And I love you, my cousin. All my cousins.

Jules Chametzky is an emeritus professor of English at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and editor emeritus of the The Massachusetts Review. His books include Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (co-editor, 2000) and From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan and Our Decentralized Literature.