More about Benjamin Harshav, z”l (1928-2015)

Two weeks ago, we reported on the death of Benjamin Harshav, translator, poet and eminent scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He died at age 86 in New Haven, Connecticut.

Since then, several full-length obituaries have appeared online, mourning his passing and celebrating his work and accomplishments. Forward notes that he was a mentor to “generations of students” and discusses his career in Israel as a poet and as a scholar at Tel Aviv University, where he founded the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature.

In Susan Bernofsky's blog Translationista, Adriana X. Jacobs comments that Harshav “leaves a tremendous legacy in the fields of Yiddish and Hebrew literary scholarship,” but also a void, because “there was something about Harshav that made him special, incomparable, and irreplaceable.” She writes about his work as a Yiddish and Hebrew poet (under the pen names H. Binyomin and Gabi Daniel) and as a translator of Yiddish and Hebrew, and includes a poem by Yehuda Amichai translated by Harshav and his wife, the translator Barbara Harshav.

The blog of Stanford University Press, which published eight books by Harshav, provides more details about his life and work.

The Yiddish Book Center has posted a video interview with Harshav, in which he discusses his childhood in Vilna. One segment of the interview is entitled “How Our Vilna School Assignments Were Accidentally Saved Through WWII by the Nazis,” a testament to his lifelong links with YIVO. (YIVO in Vilna collected the records of the Sofia Gurevitch School where Harshav was a student. When YIVO was looted by the Nazis, some of the materials were sent to Frankfurt am Main, from where YIVO was able to recover them after the war with the help of the U.S. Army.)

Read books by Benjamin Harshav:

The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania
American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology
Marc Chagall and His Times
Language in the Time of Revolution
The Meaning of Yiddish