Translating and Recovering Miriam Karpilove, Yiddish Authoress

Jessica Kirzane presents the 2023 Faye Greenberg Sigman Woman of Valor Lecture.

In person and via Zoom. For Zoom link register at https://bit.ly/Kirzane

Miriam Karpilove (1888-1956) was a prolific Yiddish writer certain of her own importance, even as she was ignored by critics and largely forgotten during her own lifetime. In this lecture, Jessica Kirzane, who has devoted the past several years to translating and championing Karpilove’s work, will explore the author’s barbed criticism of turn-of-the-century Yiddish societal expectations around gender and sexuality. Interweaving Karpilove’s biography with excerpts and discussion of her clever and humorous writing, Kirzane will paint a portrait of a quick-witted writer and the worlds she inhabited and created.

Jessica Kirzane is the assistant instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago and the editor-in-chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. She is the translator of three works by Miriam Karpilove: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love (Syracuse University Press, 2020), Judith: a tale of love and woe (Farlag Press, 2022) and A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press, forthcoming). Kirzane publishes regularly about Yiddish language pedagogy and Yiddish Studies pedagogy more broadly, in addition to her scholarship on representations of gender and race in American Jewish literature.

The lecture is made possible by the generosity of the Taxman and Temkin families.