A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories

Book Talk Admission: Free Watch the video

When the young narrator of Miriam Karpilove’s Yiddish-language A Provincial Newspaper leaves New York to work for a new Yiddish newspaper in Massachusetts, she expects to be treated with respect as a professional writer. Instead, she finds herself underpaid and overworked. In this slapstick novella, Karpilove’s narrator lampoons the gaggle of blundering publishers and editors who put her through the wringer and spit her back out again.

Along with A Provincial Newspaper, this collection, translated by Jessica Kirzane, includes nineteen stories originally published in Forverts in the 1930s, during Karpilove’s time as a staff writer at that newspaper. The stories include a large cast of characters—an older woman navigating widowhood, a writer rebuffed by dismissive audiences, American-born Jewish girls unable to communicate with Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and a painter so overcome with jealousy about his muse’s potential lover that he misses his opportunity with her—each portrayed with both sympathy and irony, in ways unexpected and delightful. Also included are Karpilove’s recollections of her arrival in Palestine in 1926, chronicled with the same buoyant cynicism and witty repartee that is beloved by readers of her fiction.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Kirzane about this newly published translation led by scholar and translator Anita Norich.

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This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. 

About the Speakers

Jessica Kirzane is the assistant instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago. She is the Editor-in-Chief for In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Her academic work has appeared in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Zutot, American Jewish History, Judaism: Race, and Ethics: Conversations and Questions (Penn State University Press, 2020) and The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives in Sexuality (CCAR Press, 2014) and her translations have been published in jewishfiction.net, Jewish Currents, Columbia Journal, Pakn Treger, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. She is the translator of Miriam Karpilove's Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love (Syracuse UP, 2019). Kirzane was a 2017 Translation Fellow and a 2018 Pedagogy Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. She earned her PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University in 2017.

Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the Gerstein Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto in Fall 2023. She is the translator of Two Feelings by Tsilye Dropkin (forthcoming), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn, and A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky. Norich is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer, and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives; Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext; and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures. She translates Yiddish literature, and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.