Abraham Karpinowitz (1913–2004), born in what is now Vilnius to a Yiddish theater family, spent World War II in the Soviet Union. He returned to the city he called Vilna in 1944, to find that the Nazis had shot almost everyone he knew near the train station of Ponary. Karpinowitz moved to Israel in 1949, became the manager of the Philharmonic Orchestra, and published stories in Yiddish. Israeli state policies supported Hebrew and disadvantaged Yiddish; these stories, then, are marked by their creation in a language not used for daily communication in the place where they were produced—nor, any more, in the place they described.

That place had contained an audible Yiddish-speaking population. Vilnius was known for its mitnagdic (non-Hasidic) rabbinic tradition, exemplified by the Lithuanian yeshiva system, the Romm press and its edition of the Talmud, and the Strashun Library of Jewish texts. Legendarily, when Napoleon passed through the city, he called it “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” The Jewish Labor Bund flourished there from the late 19^th century, as did YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institute). As detailed in Justin Cammy’s useful introduction to Vilna My Vilna, a rich Yiddish literary canon celebrated the mystique of Vilna as the center of east European Jewish intellectual life, in both its religious and revolutionary modes; the best-known Vilna Yiddish writers are the poets Avram Sutskever and Moyshe Kulbak and the prose writer Chaim Grade. This collection lets English readers hear another voice speaking with them.

Karpinowitz’s Vilna, sparse in rabbis and revolutionaries but rich in thieves, prostitutes, and actors, feels like Isaac Babel’s Odessa. The stories center on anecdotes that sound like gossip or urban folklore; they rarely focus on the war, though many end with the characters’ death at Ponary. They feature real people—with cameo appearances by historical figures such as Napoleon—and they use expressions that beg to be repeated:

A Yiddish reviewer complained, “I have never read a book by a Lithuanian writer in which I did not understand so many words” (xxi, n8).

Helen Mintz has responded valiantly to Karpinowitz’s challenge. I can vouch that the two stories I read in the original contained expressions not in my dictionaries, for which she found creative, readable renditions. Her translations of his stories—the first into English (some have already been translated into Hebrew, Russian, German, and Lithuanian)—are accessible to a popular readership but annotated for scholars. She enlists allies among lexicographers, librarians, and migrants from Vilna and thanks them vividly, even beyond the space of the “Acknowledgements” section. She notes of the staff at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal that their “skills at research go beyond the highly competent into the magical” (173); her mention of the Yiddish Book Center translation fellowship program confirms that translators benefit from training and support. Lawrence Venuti writes that the translator can appear invisible, but Mintz renders her visible, as a collective.

This is especially appropriate, since Karpinowitz’s characters themselves are all translators of a sort, people who reflect on the tenuous transportation of meaning across boundaries. In “The Folklorist,” the lame Rubinshteyn collects curses from Chane-Merke, a widow and fishseller; in “Chane-Merke the Fishwife,” she starts to collect folklore herself. In “Jewish Money,” an unnamed Jew creates his own currency, systematically backing his shekels with zloty, but is undermined by a counterfeiter. In “Shibele’s Lottery Ticket,” a winning ticket appears, then vanishes inexplicably from a pauper’s life. In “The Tree Beside the Theater,” Siomke Kagan, a self-righteous reviewer, drives a flirtatious actress out of town; this same Kagan had lived among the Roma and translated their songs into Yiddish. These stories are not, or not only, post-Holocaust memorializing. Karpinowitz’s characters demonstrate the trickle-down effect of the canonical attributes of pre-war Jewish Vilna. The city’s famous pious and secular Jews carefully documented their own and others’ words; they disputed, interviewed, surveyed, and propagandized, and they published the results. They cared about attention-getting verbal formulations. Karpinowitz suggests that poor and poorly educated Vilna Jews shared that impulse to dwell on striking language and to put things down on paper, even as they grasped the fragility of the material forms that contain human words.