Translating Jewish Poland into Canadian Yiddish: Symcha Petrushka's Mishnayes

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Translating Jewish Poland into Canadian Yiddish: Symcha Petrushka's Mishnayes
Abstract
In 1945, with European Jewry in ruins, Polish-born Symcha Bunim Petrushka (1893-1950) published the first of six volumes of his Yiddish translation and interpretation of the Mishna (the first major written redaction of the Jewish oral traditions called the "Oral Torah". It is also the first major work of Rabbinic Judaism.) Produced in Petrushka’s adopted home in Montreal, where he immigrated in 1939, the Mishnayes was conceived as a work of popularization to render one of the core texts of the Jewish tradition accessible to the Jewish masses in their common vernacular, and on the eve of World War II Yiddish was the lingua franca of millions of Jews in Europe as well as worldwide. However, the author points out that in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the destruction of the locus of Yiddish civilization and millions of speakers combined with acculturation away from Yiddish in Jewish population centres in North America, Petrushka’s Mishnayes remains a tribute to the vanished world of Polish Jewry.
Publication
TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction
Volume
Vol. 22
Issue
no. 2
Pages
183-202
Date
2e semestre 2009
Language
en
URL
Citation
Margolis, Rebecca. “Translating Jewish Poland into Canadian Yiddish: Symcha Petrushka’s Mishnayes.” TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction Vol. 22, no. 2 (2e semestre 2009): 183–202. https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ttr/2009-v22-n2-ttr3944/044829ar.pdf.
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