Malka Owsiany Recounts by Mark Turkow

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]in from?

[00:00:08]>> Where I'm joining in from Urbana, Illinois.

[00:00:11]>> Great.

[00:00:13]>> I'm joining from Brooklyn, New York.

[00:00:16]>> And I'm coming from Paris.

[00:00:18]>> Great. I see lots more greetings coming in the chat. Los Angeles, Malta, Iowa City, the Bronx, San Antonio, Texas, Mexico, California, Germany, Philly, Montreal. Welcome.

[00:00:36]And we'll get started very shortly.

[00:00:42]And today's program is being recorded and is also being live streamed directly to YouTube. So, if you miss anything or want to share the program, need to leave early, we will have the full recording on Evo's YouTube channel.

[00:00:56]And I see more greetings coming in from Kingston, Ontario, some from Jerusalem.

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[00:01:08]I There seems to be an echo. If anyone Does anyone here else hear it? How do Do I Does anyone hear an echo? If you hear an echo, I recommend watching on YouTube.

[00:01:21]Um because it's there and I'll put the link to that in the chat. There is a chance that you might have multiple windows open.

[00:01:30]Um So, I hope that helps.

[00:01:35]All right. Let's get started very shortly. So, I get my notes up.

[00:01:45]All right.

[00:01:51]All right. Let's get started.

[00:01:54]Welcome to the Evo Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Julia Rothkoff, and I'm the program associate at YIVO.

[00:02:01]Today, translator Sandra Chiritescu and preface writer Melinda Pinsky join us to talk about the English translation of Malka Oshia Oshiani recounts, a chronicle of our time by Mark Tarkov, in a discussion led by Rochelle Grossman.

[00:02:16]For those of you who do not know YIVO, we are a very special place for the celebration, contemplation, and exploration of Yiddish Eastern European Jewish culture. We are located in New York City, where our library where our library and archive contain over 24 million documents and 400,000 books, which are used by researchers from all around the world.

[00:02:36]We also have lots of classes on Yiddish language and culture, exhibitions, and public programs just like this one, where we aim to virtually explore the worlds of Jewish culture and our vast collections.

[00:02:46]So, thank you all for joining us today.

[00:02:48]Um this book is available in the YIVO store. My colleague Flora will put a link in the chat to purchase it. Um and briefly, I just want to introduce our speakers before we get started. So, Sandra Chiritescu is clinical assistant professor of Yiddish at New York University. She's previously taught Yiddish at Columbia and the Workers Circle. She holds a BA in German philology philology um from the University of Zurich and a PhD in Yiddish studies from Columbia from Columbia.

[00:03:17]Her dissertation um Bubbes, Mommies, and Daughters: Uncovering 20th and 21st Century American Jewish and American Yiddish feminist genealogies brings together her research interests in Yiddish literature and culture, American Jewish literature, feminist and queer theory, and translation theory.

[00:03:36]And Melinda Pinsky's research focuses on Shoah commemoration in post-war Yiddish culture, particular particularly in Buenos Aires and Paris.

[00:03:44]She has published and widely edited She has published widely and co-edited Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America, published by Brill in 2018. And she also learned Yiddish at the Eva Foundation of Buenos Aires and teaches Yiddish through Eva in New York.

[00:04:01]And Rochelle Grossman is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

[00:04:08]Her work focuses on the intersection of Yiddish and its transnational connections with other literatures, languages, and cultures.

[00:04:14]In her research, she develops a geopolitical approach to literature focusing especially on the transformation of literary centers and peripheries in the post-war period. She is also interested in technologies of print and how they impact literature as material culture. So, thank you all for joining and um we will get started.

[00:04:34]>> Thank you, Julia, and thank you everybody for being here. Milena Himschoot, Sandra Chiritescu, it's so wonderful to be in conversation with you, um lovely colleagues, especially on the occasion of the publication of this new and wonderful translation, uh Malka Heifetz Tzeidel recounts. And so, today I am going to be a host to take us through a lovely conversation about this book and its context, its publication. I'm going to share my screen here so that we can see some images.

[00:05:14]I hope that you can see um this is just for the sake of the introduction here.

[00:05:21]Um I'd also like to welcome Rosa Nierenberg, Malka's daughter, and other family members who are in attendance today.

[00:05:28]Um I'd really like to thank Rosa for bringing this new translation to light, and if you're up for it, at the end of our discussion, we invite you to share a few words.

[00:05:41]I am going to give a brief introduction about Malka um and her life.

[00:05:47]then Sandra is going to give us a little bit of a synopsis of the plot, um, of this book, and then we're going to have a conversation about it. So, um, while I do that, I also I'm going to show some pictures, um, most of which can be found in this new edition, which really add to our understanding of the story and, uh, um, this important person.

[00:06:11]So, I, um, want to share here that Malka of Shiani, later Nuremberg, she was born in 1925 in Raków, which is a town in Poland near Kielce.

[00:06:26]Her father and her two siblings immigrated to Argentina before World War II, which is important, of course, for her post-war story.

[00:06:35]Milena, uh, has written about Malka of Shiani's life, and she has, uh, written that the book follows of Shiani from her childhood years in Raków through expulsions, hiding in the woods, loss of relatives, deportations, captivity in Kielce, in Auschwitz, in Ravensbrück, up to her liberation in 1945.

[00:06:59]And I will, uh, add that Malka of Shiani was sent as a refugee to Sweden before she immigrated to Buenos Aires, where she was reunited with her family.

[00:07:09]And the story was published in book form in Yiddish in 1946.

[00:07:15]It is one of the earliest examples of Holocaust literature that would become, as we know now, quite a large and very important genre. In 1946, of course, this was just the beginning of this process of thinking about, um, how to tell stories about what had happened to people in the Holocaust.

[00:07:35]And her book was published, as I said, in Spanish, sorry, in in Yiddish in 1946.

[00:07:42]It was translated into Spanish in 2001, and now for the first time into English.

[00:07:48]And we can see these are some of the covers of these different editions in Yiddish with this illustration and this black and red text. In Spanish, we have images of Malka different times of her life and this Arbeit Macht Frei, we have different images of Holocaust memory that we associate with that. And this new edition here where she's waving from this image here from the newsreel when she arrived in Sweden.

[00:08:22]And I'm going to turn things over to Sandra here to give us a short synopsis of the book and then I'm going to ask Sandra and Milena some questions to put us all in conversation about its reception and more.

[00:08:35]And again, thank you for joining us and I look forward to our conversations.

[00:08:40]Sandra, could you tell us a bit more about Malka of Sheean's story?

[00:08:45]>> Um hi everyone. Thank you for having me and thank you Eva for hosting and of course also thank you Rosa Nirenberg and the other members of the family for bringing this English translation out.

[00:08:56]I'll be giving like Rochelle said, I'll be giving a kind of a brief synopsis and I've just used images of maps to kind of pinpoint us in the geography of where this narrative takes us. So as Rochelle was explaining right this is this is a piece of Holocaust testimony so it focuses almost exclusively on the kind of 1939 to 1945 period of Malka's life under um Nazi rule which that maps onto the years of being 14 to 20 years old for her. So she was a teenager for the duration of the Holocaust and she was born and lived in Rakow Um, we can see here right in the bottom right corner. It is relatively close to the bigger a city of Kielce, where she was later in a labor camp. And there's kind of a little bit of mention in her testimony of kind of pre-war life in Rakow. She also um really gets into kind of the details of Polish-Jewish relations and what those were like both um kind of leading up to the Holocaust and then during the Holocaust. And I think Milena kind of gets a little bit more into um that in her preface, and maybe she'll want to say a little bit more about the depiction of Polish-Jewish relations uh in this testimony. Um, and then yeah, so um as we also heard earlier, right, Milena was also as the Nazis occupied Poland Malka, sorry, not Milena, Malka was was first kind of hiding out um hiding out in the forests, and then eventually was captured and ended up doing um heavy labor around in and around the Kielce labor camp.

[00:10:38]Before her next station being in I think that's our next image being in um Auschwitz.

[00:10:45]Um yes, right in here I we see kind of the location of Auschwitz between the larger Polish cities Katowice and Krakow. Um so that was her that was kind of her intermediary station. And of course, right, we have there are numerous testimonies that depict life um in Auschwitz, but I would say Malka's certainly among the very first and also among the probably the first um kind of testimony of a woman um describing what it was like to be in prison in Auschwitz.

[00:11:15]Um, so certainly an important historical document in that respect.

[00:11:19]Um, and then from Auschwitz, Malka actually was taken to Ravensbruck.

[00:11:25]Uh a rather different camp, and we see here, right, Ravensbruck is outside Berlin. What you see here at the bottom with some of my personal pins on Google Maps is Berlin. Um so, Ravensbrück was a labor camp outside Berlin. It was a women's camp. It also included a large number of non-Jewish prisoners. Um and there Malka was also roped um once again into doing um a type of ammunition work, uh kind of a type of factory and ammunition work, which she had some experience with from her earlier um uh labor work in and around Kielce. So, and in some ways that was um that was her good, you know, in air quotes, of course, her good fortune because it um allowed her to um to remain to remain working and remain again, in air quotes, kind of useful.

[00:12:11]Um and she she gets into more details about that in the later chapters. And then, post-liberation, as we also saw already earlier, Malka was um ended up the first in Malmö, right? Kind of we see here, right? This is at the the kind of close to Denmark, actually. It's at the southern edge of Sweden.

[00:12:28]Um where she kind of spent a brief a brief couple of months, I think, before ultimately emigrating to Buenos Aires, which was kind of the the final the last destination for her, where she rejoined um a number of her family members.

[00:12:43]Um and kind of began her post-war life, which is also where she um encountered Mark Turkov, who who took her testimony. And I think, again, Malena will have a little bit more to say about the relationship between um Mark Turkov and um Malka, and how he came to um take down her testimony and publish it.

[00:13:03]Um does that Does that sound good, Rochelle?

[00:13:09]>> Yes, that's wonderful, and it's a great introduction to the to the story that uh we want to discuss together. And I I remember you um gave us an excerpt here. Did you want to talk about its excerpt from the book?

[00:13:22]>> Um so, um this is an excerpt from the very last chapter, which is kind of um, uh an epilogue by Mark Turkov.

[00:13:32]And I I pick this excerpt, right, and we have here both the edition English. I picked it because I think it tells us a little bit about kind of this very interesting relationship between Mark Turkov and Malka, which I think we'll be discussing a little more detail later.

[00:13:46]Um, and like right, because the question, right, we always have questions, right? The questions we always have about Holocaust testimony is, you know, how how is the testimony taken down? What is left unsaid? What is said? What, you know, what kind of mediating effect does a an interviewer have, for example, if we're thinking of the kind of our large archives of video testimony starting in the '80s and '90s um, in the US.

[00:14:08]Um, but I'll just read the English here, but which says that Malka Shiani did not tell me everything she saw and experienced. It was simply impossible to do so. And I did not include everything Malka Shiani told me. It was also impossible to do so. Not only because describing all details would have taken several volumes, but simply because I had to control my nerves in order to listen to everything calmly, so that I would be able to describe it. I took notes only on the most important things, only the most vivid, in order to be able to comprehend at least partially how terribly the people were tortured and how much strength they needed to endure it all.

[00:14:42]It is interesting that in the most hopeless moment of their bitter fate, these tortured people sought to strengthen themselves spiritually through writing poetry. As if they wanted thereby to ease their heavy hearts, express their protest through poetry, and their will to fight. They strengthened their rebellious souls through poems. These creations, whose authors are often unknown, are beginning to occupy an important place in Jewish and general literary scholarship. So, in the second paragraph here, right, we see how Mark Turkov shifts away from the question of kind of, you know, what does and doesn't end up in a piece of Holocaust testimony. He actually shifts away from the genre of the, you know, maybe more tightly circumscribed genre of testimony to the genre of poetry, and he actually includes a little poem to towards the end of his epilogue. Um and I think right this kind of brings us to this question, right? We have Holocaust testimony can take so many different forms, right? We have uh these types of testimonies as we see from Malka, we have these larger video archives from, let's say, Fortunoff and USC Shoah Foundation, which again, I think Malka actually um participated in.

[00:15:46]And then, of course, we also have literature created during and after the Holocaust, more or less fictionalized to various degrees. So, really, together all of these forms um these forms of testimony are what um inform us about the Holocaust.

[00:16:03]>> Milena, I'm wondering if you might tell us a little bit about Mark Turkow and why he was involved with Malka of Shehani's story.

[00:16:16]>> Sure.

[00:16:17]So, um Mark Turkow was um first uh he's he's known um as part of the Turkow family. When we look up uh who Mark Turkow was, this is the first thing that that comes up. A family of Warsaw Jewish intellectuals and artists, s- uh cinema um film and theater artists, and community activists. And Mark Turkow was um a journalist worked at the Der Moment in Warsaw.

[00:16:48]And um he wrote s- several travelogues.

[00:16:53]So, um chronicle of his travels um with an intention of advocating um Jewish immigration from Poland.

[00:17:03]As part of this of of his um of his travels, he spent some time in the Jewish colonies in Argentina, and and he published um a a travelogue of his uh of think this travel.

[00:17:17]Um in 1939. And this was the year where he emigrated as well to Argentina. He said he settled in Argentina.

[00:17:25]And there he became a very strong figure, an important community activist both in the in the realm of the Polish foreign and the immigrant societies and also international Jewish organizations.

[00:17:41]Um So, in when Malka Shani came to Argentina, he was already the president of the Central Central Farband from Polish in Argentina, the Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina.

[00:17:57]So, this this organization gathered many different immigrant societies of Polish Jewish origin. And we we can ask ourselves why the the arrival of Malka Shani had such a visibility which many other survivors didn't get. And this is probably due to different factors. And why Malka got interested in her.

[00:18:25]On one hand, we have to mention that her early arrival because most of the survived the Jewish survivors began arriving in the 50s.

[00:18:34]Second, we must mention that Malka Shani immigrated legally to Argentina with a visa. Whereas most of the survivors entered in clandestinely in Argentina.

[00:18:47]So, you wouldn't make big noise out of it in the press.

[00:18:53]And then a third and most importantly, she was a Polish Jewish woman.

[00:19:00]This is Polish Jew. And for for the Polish Jews living in Argentina in the interwar years, this was a turning point, the arrival of the of the first Polish Jewish survivors. There were a few others other survivors already in the country.

[00:19:21]There there are some traces of this, but she was she was deemed as the first and this is probably because of her Polish Jewish origin. So Mark Turkov as a president of the central farband, he approached Malkah Shani in order to interview her and to publish her testimony. First in the press in this serialized in the press and then as a book. And here in the two images that are on the screen, on see on one hand this the exceptional fact of announcing on the front page of the Depresser, one of the two Yiddish dailies in Argentina, the the arrival of Malkah Shani in Montevideo two days after her departure from Sweden. As Kumta Gerate ve Yiddish Maidel is the word Gerate ve is used is used usually in that period to call rescued as to the survivors.

[00:20:17]And this is something that wouldn't happen later on to have a front page announcing the arrival of a survivor.

[00:20:26]And the other image is only 12 days after her arrival, Malkah Shani was invited to take part in a large ally in the Luna Park Stadium in Argentina. Buenos Aires.

[00:20:42]It was not a ceremony dedicated to her in particular, but she was part of the speakers and this was a fundraising ceremony in which she was introduced to the audience around between 12,000 and 15,000 people and she was asked to say a few words. She didn't tell her story, but she introduced herself and and in representation of the survivors in Europe also because of fundraising purposes for the organizers, but this was the first time a survivor of the Holocaust faced the Argentinian Jews who had been afar had experienced war from afar and who had very often lost their entire families.

[00:21:33]>> Milena, could you tell us a little bit about um Malka's trajectory from Ravensbruck to Buenos Aires? She stayed in Sweden, which um is a story that I don't think is commonly known for um this period.

[00:21:47]People talk about DP camps and and that history, but um that she was in Sweden seems to be pretty uh unique or maybe it wasn't unique. Um could you talk to us about that?

[00:21:59]>> Sure. I mean, every experience is of course unique, but from a certain perspective, we can also say that her her trajectory was common to thousands of people because uh Malka Shining was rescued within the framework of the white buses rescue mission, which was um uh organized in Sweden not long before the end of the not long before German capitulation.

[00:22:33]The vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, the Count Folke Bernadotte, negotiated with a high SS leader in Germany for the liberation of a certain amount of prisoners who would be in the in in principle Scandinavian prisoners uh in in the in the concentration camps.

[00:22:56]This was in a context when it was clear that Germany would lose the war. So, um the Red Cross, the Swedish Red Cross negotiated for these Scandinavian prisoners, but then this advanced and it ended up broadening the scope of the of the people who would be rescued and it ended up including thousands of prisoners of other nationalities and especially thousands of female prisoners from Ravensbruck.

[00:23:26]Both Jew- Jewish and non-Jewish um women who were imprisoned in Ravensbruck.

[00:23:32]And it is within this framework that Malkov Shani saved her life. And this was the case of It is estimated that around 15,000 people were saved in the White Buses rescue mission.

[00:23:46]And around 10,000 Jews found themselves in Sweden uh in 1945.

[00:23:54]So, in this respect, it's not unique.

[00:23:58]And her her itinerary from Ravensbruck to um to Malmo is also not unique. I mean, these people were evacuated in the so-called White Buses. These were buses that had to be uh very well labeled because this was a context of Allied bombing of German cities, uh roads, and vehicles. And this is all This is featured in the testimony in the the moment when the the buses leave the camp and there's a moment of where they're they're they are attacked. The caravan is attacked. It is not uh clearly stated, but these were These were Allied bombs because sometimes the messages didn't get to those who were who were uh supposed to um not to attack certain vehicles and so on and so forth. So, she left in a caravan with a with a some 25 vehicles um crossing Nazi Germany up to the border, then crossing occupied Denmark, but still occupied, up until they were able to cross with a on a ship to to Sweden.

[00:25:12]And they were received in Malmö and as we see in the in the book cover, these were these were crowds of survivors.

[00:25:20]This was not only one. We we see all these people and also their the arrival of the survivors was a very a strong very strongly covered by the media in Sweden. This was they were very visible. And also the White Buses rescue mission was was documented carefully by the by Sweden because this for for propaganda purposes because countries were trying to build their post-war image as well. So, that's why the the rescue mission was so well documented and that's why we have these these wonderful pictures like the one that comes from the newsreel. This was This was produced by the Swedish state television in on April 28th, 1945. This is this is actually a video. It's not it's not a still, but the still was taken from the video, which is we I I watched it. You actually Malka is moving. He's waving her hand. And so, this was documented and um that's where the image was was was drawn from. And if I may say a side comment the some of these images were used in the in the documentary Harbor of Hope produced by a Swedish documentary filmmaker, Magnus Gertten, on and and he created a website where he where featured many of these images and it was looking at this website that Rosa Nirenberg saw the two pictures were in which her mother was featured. And that's the story of the book cover.

[00:27:07]>> Well, that's amazing.

[00:27:09]Um I I'm curious about the trajectory of um of this this young woman. She's a teenager and she comes, you know, from from this horrible experience.

[00:27:25]She comes to Buenos Aires. She's featured in this very public way on the stage in Luna Park with thousands of people.

[00:27:34]And how that character, maybe we think of her this way, how she appears in this book which is not even attributed to her. That this is uh written by Mark Turkov or Mark Turkov is the author.

[00:27:49]And um I'll share that I came to know Malka's story because of the series that it inaugurated. This is the Dos Poylisher Yidntum book series that Mark Turkov um put out.

[00:28:04]And it was a major uh major central location for post-Holocaust Yiddish writing, Yiddish literature, Holocaust testimony, but not only.

[00:28:14]And hers was the very first um that inaugurated this whole uh series and in many ways a genre itself of Holocaust writing.

[00:28:24]I wanted to share an excerpt from the very beginning of of this book that I think sets it off in an interesting way and I'm hoping we can talk a little bit about the gender and power relations between Mark Turkov and Malka Avshani as they show up in the book.

[00:28:43]Um Mark Turkov writes in the beginning of his introduction.

[00:28:47]It is strange after all. It seems as if everything that Malka of Shani tells us we've already read in newspapers and books, in memoirs and even in literature.

[00:28:57]Authors such as Sholem Asch, Joseph Opatoshu, Zalman Shneur Zalman Glozman, uh H. Leivick and the tragically murdered Yitzhak Katzenelson and many others describe it in their works.

[00:29:09]And yet if you hear the description straight from a person who directly experienced it all, you are swept along and it feels as if you yourself are experiencing it too.

[00:29:18]Malka of Shani describes it to you so vividly, so naturally and without any exaggeration.

[00:29:24]Besides, do you even need to exaggerate when the story itself is not more than a reflection of tragic reality?

[00:29:31]And what has always struck me about this um description here is the ways in which Mark Turkov references these great men of Yiddish letters, Sholem Asch, uh Opatoshu, Leivick, who are not Holocaust survivors. They're not writing Holocaust testimony. They're writing uh they they wrote fantastic works of literature.

[00:29:54]And he compares Malka's story to works that they might have written. Yet she describes it to you so vividly, naturally and without any exaggeration.

[00:30:05]Which seems to me to say that she is sort of more naturally attuned to the story because she lived it or or there's something happening here with um gender, with literature and with this narrative that I I'm not so certain about and I'm wondering if we might comment on this.

[00:30:28]This is a question from Elena and for Sandra, but um what are we to make of the gender and power relations in this book between the uh so-called author, Mark Turkov, and Malka of Shani?

[00:30:42]And how do they show up in the book?

[00:30:44]Whose voice are we really hearing? Whose story is it?

[00:30:47]Um Yeah, maybe maybe Milena, you might start us off because you were telling us a little bit about Tworkov, so what do you think?

[00:30:57]>> Yes, um I I agree that the comparison with these writers it it is a bit puzzling.

[00:31:06]Um but I feel the comparison is between these professional writers, what they tell about Jewish life in in the Alter Heim, and what it means to hear to listen to a person telling. And I think this this is the point the the main point about the book is the this encounter between the survivor witness and the person willing to listen.

[00:31:43]Um and how the book is a result of this encounter and of the creation of certain conditions of listening, which enabled such a work to emerge, and that wouldn't be repeated because Mark Tworkov did not interview other incoming survivors for the collection.

[00:32:06]This was the first and actually only time when when he did. So, from that respect, it is unique.

[00:32:16]And in regard to the to the gender power, well, of course, he was the author and he was a well-educated person and intellectual, and Malkah had spent 6 years in captivity, and she always regretted the the are having had the opportunity of having an education. So, from my perspective, the the main point about uh how gender power is uh uh featured in the in the in this work has to do with with the knowledge. Who is the bearer of knowledge? One is the One has the knowledge of the who the one who directly experienced as it is written as it is written this quotation, and the other one has all the the possibility of contextualizing, of adding historical information, and encyclopedic aspects of what is being told, and to shape the narrative. So, for me, the aspect of I I would underline the aspect of knowledge.

[00:33:30]But, maybe probably Sandra has other perspectives about it.

[00:33:33]>> Um Yeah, no, I think you got a um a lot of important points, and I think in some ways what's happening here between Mark and Malka um kind of preempts, I think, some of this conversation scholars have been having about these larger archives of Holocaust video testimony and the roles kind of the interviewers play in those as listeners and as um kind of factors that really shape the narrative that emerges in the ways they do or don't listen or interrupt or kind of push forward or particular set of questionnaires. Of course, the situation here is a little different, right? We're in 1946, so we're kind of right We're like at the emergence of kind of even the concept of Holocaust memory, right? And we there aren't as many kind of preset notions about what Holocaust memory like should or shouldn't look like. But, of course, I'm sure these kind of particularly gender dynamics, which we also see sometimes in um the video testimonies between, let's say, male interviewers and especially in this case younger female interviewees where they may or may not be comfortable discussing topics, you know, let's say that just gender topics or topics of, you know, let's say sexual violence, which I know are kind of big silences in the Holocaust archives.

[00:34:48]Um are present and also like which I think doesn't hasn't become entirely clear from the excerpts we've shared, but really this entire testimony's written in the third person, which makes sense because like we were saying Mark is the author and um Malka is the interviewee. Um but it is I think in that in that sense a little different from a lot of other Holocaust testimony that really kind of inhabits the first-person narrative.

[00:35:11]Um so that's I think certainly makes it um stand out in a couple of ways.

[00:35:17]Um and like also like we saw in the excerpt I shared, right? Mark is kind of he's open about the fact that he is also an editor to some degree, right? There are he was listening, he was making choices about what to write down, about what to pack into the volume he ultimately created and what to what to leave out. And you know, to some degree we'll never know what he left out, but also like I was saying like I think Milena I'm sure has watched them. We have two pieces of video testimony also from Malka, which can serve as a complement to this. Um but in some ways, right? These this type of written testimony and published in book form is more accessible because um a lot of these kind of pieces of video Holocaust testimony are sometimes there's, you know, questions of institutional access and you know, how do we how do we even consume a piece of video video Holocaust testimony versus how we are kind of, you know, used to reading books. So I think those those questions of format also come into play.

[00:36:15]>> Sandra, as the translator of this edition, do you think of yourself as a mediator like Turkov?

[00:36:21]>> Um I mean certainly to some degree and I know kind of in the contemporary translator community, especially when we're talking about literary translation, which this wasn't strictly speaking, there are right, there's kind of the the trend toward um placing the narrator as, you know, kind of a writer in his own right, um or like, you know, the the translator as the translator as a writer in his own right. I'm sorry, I misspoke there.

[00:36:48]Um and, you know, kind of um having you know, really the translator is the one kind of finding a voice and a style in let's say the English in this case, which you know, is I think true to some degree, but again, because this isn't this isn't kind of contemporary literary fiction we're translating here, it's quite a different situation. So, I do think there's maybe some mediation going on, but I don't think it's as I don't think it's as prominent. I think there's less of my kind of, you know, maybe personal, you know, stylistic inclinations or my personal thoughts of, you know, style in English writing than we might see if it were a piece of literary fiction. I think it's the the non-fiction aspect and the fact that it was already mediated by Mark Terkessidis.

[00:37:31]I think changes the dynamic, certainly.

[00:37:34]>> Were there any moments of difficulty that you encountered translating a work of this content, you know, the um challenges of translating Holocaust material or or maybe there were linguistic things that were difficult. Can you tell us a little bit about your process?

[00:37:54]>> Yes, sure. And we also have a little bit an image here, right, where we can see how I typically work. Um yes, so this is this is the software I typically use for translating. So, I like to go kind of have a parallel view side by side and to, you know, be able to go over and make edits. And we saw here there was one line I had marked. The line I marked here in yellow I think was something I wasn't quite happy with and was still thinking about. Um and I think oh, it's actually I think it's very close to the um excerpt you put you ended up posting.

[00:38:21]So, one kind of just technical element that's all can always be a little difficult is just translating place names in Yiddish literature or in Yiddish um documents because y- for the most part, most places in Eastern Europe had a Yiddish name that differs to either a smaller or larger degree from the kind of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian equivalent. And there's always a little bit of detective work involved in finding um the contemporary equivalent. And also of course a choice, like do I when I'm translating a piece of Yiddish, do I want to use the Yiddish place name or do I want to use maybe what is currently the place names that people could actually go like look up where this is or like learn more about the history of that place.

[00:38:59]Um, Rosa was also quite helpful in that front. She did a little bit of work on the place names and she was comparing what was happening in the Spanish edition where I think those translators had already done some of that work. Um, so I think we were able to kind of get at a pretty neat result there. And we I think we settled on mostly using the contemporary, I think for the most part Polish in this case, place names so people had a sense of where these would be on the map today.

[00:39:24]Um, otherwise I think a general kind of for me what is always strange when I trans when I translate Holocaust material is that you're what you first of all you're going like rather slowly, right? Cuz you're translating so you're really kind of dwelling and lingering in these, you know, sentences or paragraphs that kind of describe very horrifying things. And this so the slowing down kind of makes you linger there, but also the fact that you're kind of translating and just thinking about like syntax and words or like looking up a word makes you sometimes strangely distance from it.

[00:39:55]Like you'll right? Like I also I've I've once translated something about the um the trucks that were used in Khelmno, the early the earlier versions of the gas chambers and I was like they were describing kind of I think the way the pipes were running and the way the gas was going back into the truck and it was a little confusing. So I spent a lot of time just kind of looking at that and thinking about like, oh, how do I, you know, what's the the word for the pipe here?

[00:40:16]What is this word? And it's, you know, something so horrific and inhumane and genocidal. And then you're just sitting there kind of, you know, looking up a single word and um pondering over a sentence. So, to me, that's always rather strange when I'm translating Holocaust material more so than anything else. And right there, it was kind of the same case here. Sometimes you would just kind of linger on a sentence or think about a comma or how you might want to rearrange something so it flows nicely in English. Right? Again, kind of the question of like nice flow, but like a nice flow for something that's describing, you know, describing violence and inhumane conditions. It's there's a strange disconnect there for me often.

[00:40:53]>> Can you tell us about how you came to translate the story? I understand um something that's really fantastic about this edition, wait, that doesn't exist um in the in the Yiddish or even in the Spanish um is the story behind the story in a very um explicit way. This uh edition includes um a a lovely and interesting piece about COVID and about how people in this family um were reuniting over Zoom, and then there was an interest in reading this book in English.

[00:41:26]Um so, I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit about how you got involved with this project.

[00:41:31]>> Yes, uh certainly. And I should I think maybe Rosa will have a little bit more to say on that front as well. But I was contacted by Rosa. I think it was kind of a, you know, it was a bit of a telephone game. I think Rosa initially was in touch with the Paris Yiddish Center with um I think it's Tal Nemirovsky who runs it. And then he kind of forwarded it to one of my friends who was involved with the center at that time, who does a lot of translation work, but who was um too too preoccupied to take on a translation project of this size. And then she forwarded the thing to me. And again, like right, this was kind of right during COVID. So, it was a strange um a strange era for everyone involved. Um but I had some extra time on my hands.

[00:42:10]Um so, I accepted this project, and we worked, um, you know, we worked long distance, we worked online exclusively.

[00:42:16]I would, you know, kind of put together a couple of chapters here and there and send them to Rosa who did a little bit of editing. Um, I think she had another collaborator who helped her a little bit with editing before, you know, she actually approached the press who ultimately published it. So, we went back and forth like that, um, until we, I think we finished a product around 2020 or like mid-2020.

[00:42:38]2022, I'm sorry, 2022.

[00:42:40]So, we we worked on and off for like 1 and 1/2 to 2 years, I think, give or take, back and forth.

[00:42:45]Um, and then Rosa kind of went on and tried to locate a publisher which I know wasn't, um, super straightforward either. So, she put a lot of work in on that front um, before she kind of settled a deal with Cherry Orchard Press a while ago.

[00:42:59]Um, and yeah, I met Rosa in person for the first time this February. So, a couple of years after we we kind of had concluded our work together, we we actually met up and that was very nice.

[00:43:09]Um, which was like cuz it cuz it co-occurred more or less with the publication of the book, so that was a nice, um, a nice conclusion to this collaboration.

[00:43:19]>> So, um, I want to make sure to save some time for questions and if you have any questions, please do share them with us in the Q&A uh, function of Zoom here below. Um, but before we sort of wrap up our formal discussion here, I do want to invite Rosa Nürnberg, uh, Malkah's daughter, to to speak with us, to share a few words. I have some questions for Rosa, but also I want to give her an opportunity just to just to, uh, speak to everybody here. Is there, uh, Julia, technically speaking, are we able to do that?

[00:43:53]>> I don't know whether I am. Do you Do you hear me now?

[00:43:56]>> Oh, we hear you.

[00:43:57]>> We hear you.

[00:43:58]>> Okay. So, I I wanted just to thank Ivol to organ, for organizing this event and Sandra Malen, of course, that I they've been helping me in any way. Malena, basically, without her, the book wouldn't have been here because she she she did most of the authorizations and stuff to make the translation going.

[00:44:22]And And Sandra was right there the the link came through Itzhak Bogursky just because we belong to the same Yiddish community in Argentina, and I didn't have any idea when I decided to do that. Uh I we just did it because our family members ask us. The fact that it's interesting by people like you, it's a double farginen. I have to say something in Yiddish, my mother would love it. But I want to say that my siblings are not with me, but they are in Toronto, the three of us. And she would be very happy also to know that all of us are together hearing about her.

[00:45:07]>> That's wonderful. Um thank you, Rosa. I was really surprised, but maybe I shouldn't be surprised to read about how the the interest came from a grandson who wanted to read the story.

[00:45:23]And so that set off this initiative, I suppose, to find a translator and to to make this book come become available in English. And um I'm curious to know how this book has brought the family together. I mean, you mentioned just now that uh the family is really spread out.

[00:45:44]And so um does Malka's story, or having this legacy, is there something about it that has also, I don't know, um had an effect on the family?

[00:45:56]>> Well, the the ask was not by a grandson, was by a second cousin that I've never met, actually. And And it was right because COVID united us via via Zoom on a family historical Hanukkah [laughter] party that was started in Toronto. So, my mother had family here in Toronto and she was very proud and she very loved that family.

[00:46:25]And so, I I was surprised that that that somebody wanted to read it another Holocaust story, you know, because they are all They're all unique, but they're all the same, you know? And And they were all in We have it in Spanish. All Malka's kids and grandkids and so far great-grandkids speak Spanish. So, I didn't feel the need of having it in English.

[00:46:53]But, we couldn't say no because it was it almost with with emotion that that they wanted to know.

[00:47:01]They It is a very wonderful family. My mother had 13 They were 13 siblings and at that Hanukkah party, they were descendants of seven or eight of them.

[00:47:13]And so, I don't think a book was required to unite that It's We are pretty united from many many countries and And that's why I we wanted to do it.

[00:47:25]That's why we translated it.

[00:47:28]And as I said, the fact that it's interested by more people that family, it's just great.

[00:47:40]>> Well, thank you, Rosa. And I I want to share I plan on assigning this book to my class on Holocaust literature.

[00:47:48]I'm so glad that this book has been translated into English. For for my research and my teaching.

[00:47:54]And so, I want to thank you and of course, Sandra for doing a really really important job of doing the legwork on the translation, of course, and Milena for everything that you did as well to make this happen.

[00:48:08]Um we have a little bit of time now for some questions. I see we have a few in the Q&A.

[00:48:14]And I want to um let's see. We have sort of two categories here. The first might be something maybe for Rosa to answer from Jerry Austin.

[00:48:28]Um he asks, "Do we know much about Malka's early life, and are there other sources where that information can be found?"

[00:48:36]He also asks, "Uh Ofshani means oats in Polish. It's true. I think a relatively rare Jewish surname and one more commonly known as a non-Jewish surname.

[00:48:46]Have you looked into Malka's genealogy?

[00:48:49]My father's surname was also Ofshana."

[00:48:54]>> Um I know nothing about my Ofshani branch of the family. So, we have both of my parents were Holocaust survivors. I have idea of two of my grandparents, my mother's mother's and my father's father.

[00:49:08]I I know nothing about Ofshani, unfortunately. I I And I tried to look once, but you know, we have a big the both families we know about, they are they're big, and we are close on both sides.

[00:49:25]>> Mhm.

[00:49:25]>> Nothing.

[00:49:28]>> Well, maybe a future project for some somebody somewhere.

[00:49:33]Um Thank you.

[00:49:36]Uh another question.

[00:49:39]The Spanish translation of Malka Ofshani, Malka Ofshani Relata, contains a short epilogue by Malka's granddaughter Anna, which was obviously not part of the original Yiddish edition. Is it included in the English translation?

[00:49:53]Sandra, maybe you could talk a little bit about the paratexts, um the additional pieces that are in this edition. I I wanted to highlight also the photographs that are in this edition, as well as I I was really struck by a letter that was sent um from uh an aunt, I believe, in Canada to Malka when she's in Sweden.

[00:50:12]Um what what hap- What do we have here that's in addition to the the story itself?

[00:50:18]>> Yeah, so we have, of course, as we've mentioned, and we have the preface by Milena, which gives us kind of a historical and otherwise um some context, some of which we got in this um talk. Um there's also the Yiddish introduction, which was part of the original volume, which gives a little bit of a framing in terms of the kind of the series, this Koyle der Shaydn Toym, which he um Milena also talked a little bit about. We have um pretty extensive inclusion of various family photographs, some of which we saw um on our slides, but there are more in the book. And these were all, I think, put together by Rosa together with her family.

[00:50:54]Um there's a a little bit of this epilogue we looked up by Mark Turkov.

[00:50:57]Again, that one is part of the original Yiddish. Um we have a set of acknowledgements by Rosa, um which comes before some of these um photos. And like you said, right, some of these photos um right, some of these photos had text on the back, which were uh translated. There um is a letter from 1933 that was sent to Rakow, which was translated by Vivian Felzen.

[00:51:25]Um so yeah, there's some um there's another letter that was sent to Toronto in 1945, translated by Sharon Power. So we have a couple, right, a a number of kind of different ephemera that really frame the story and give us a little bit a glimpse of kind of what came before and after 1939 and 1945.

[00:51:45]And kind of where, you know, how to situate this text in kind of a 20, you know, let's say 2026 North American context.

[00:51:52]>> And I'll just add to the specific question. I don't believe that this epilogue from Anna is in the English edition.

[00:51:58]Though there is a very interesting um preface or or or something by the by the family and the story of the translation or the story of how it came about and what the import is. Um as I think, you know, these three books together are well worth reading if you can do Spanish and Yiddish and English and to see how this really builds on this one person's story as well as there are the testimonies that are available in the Fortunoff Archive and in the USC Shoah Foundation. And so, I think Milena has a nice way of talking about it. You mentioned the um the afterlife of Malka Opshany's story and we really see that here as it it gets uh fleshed out, of course, in all these different kinds of media with images and with ephemera.

[00:52:49]And it's not just the story she's telling to Turkow in the '40s, but really everything else that has come that adds to it. Um as well as pictures in um in the Spanish edition, I believe, where there's they they go back to Poland and they go to Auschwitz or in in this edition, there are pictures on the airplane going back to Poland and seeing neighbors that she used to have when she was in Raków when she was young. And so, there are so many kind of nodes that branch out and and make this quite an interesting um document, I would say.

[00:53:25]Um a question for Milena.

[00:53:31]Referring to the question, whose voice are we reading in the testimony?

[00:53:35]Do you know um if Turkow's original manuscripts have been preserved anywhere from his interviews with Malka or if not manuscripts, maybe his stories as they were that his the serialized edition of the of the story if it matches closely or if it departs. Can you talk to that a little bit?

[00:53:57]>> The manuscript, no, I haven't seen any manuscript. The the serialized text, yes, it is available in the National Library of Buenos Aires and uh Yes, it it seems to be pretty I I haven't read the full I haven't collected the full uh book in the serialized uh version, but um it seemed to be close or the same as the the book.

[00:54:29]But this is something that um I can't affirm 100%.

[00:54:33]>> Mhm.

[00:54:35]I just want to add it like this right the kind of this early history of the text as a serialization, I think, still comes through cuz the as we saw maybe as a few as you see when you look at the table of contents, it's really relatively short chapters that are you know somewhat work as standalone um kind of snippets and vignettes also, um which again is something that I think we commonly see in Yiddish publishing.

[00:55:00]>> Right, it's the feuilleton format. That that's how Yiddish readers uh first encounter this kind of text until it became a book.

[00:55:13]>> Do you know if Malka did she ever encounter any former Nazis while she lived in Argentina after the war?

[00:55:21]>> I don't have any information about that.

[00:55:23]I don't know about that.

[00:55:25]But you former Nazis were not like um going around the street in every corner.

[00:55:32]It's not like >> announcing it, right? That's also Right, it's complicated in Argentina after the war.

[00:55:39]Um.

[00:55:40]>> Yeah.

[00:55:43]>> Well, if there are no further questions, I want to take this opportunity again to thank um Milena, to thank Sandra, Rosa, Ivo, and um the lovely folks who have helped us put this on.

[00:55:58]And I really look forward to um using this text, and I appreciate very much the effort that has gone in to making it available.

[00:56:10]And Rosa is asking about a link to the recording, so I will let Julia take care of that. Thank you, Julia.

[00:56:18]And um thank you all for coming to this event today, and I hope to see you at something in the future.

[00:56:28]>> Thank you.

[00:56:30]All right. Thank you so much. Um again, the book is available in the YIVO store, um and elsewhere online, and it's a very I was just looking through all the different all the photos as well.

[00:56:46]There's tons of different things to look at, so I highly highly encourage um you to pick up a copy.

[00:56:54]And thank you all. Thank you, Sandra, Milena, Rochelle, Rosa.

[00:57:00]Um the recording of today's program is in the chat. I'll put it in the chat again.

[00:57:05]Um and we will see you at the next program.

[00:57:09]I'll leave the Zoom room open for just a few more minutes, so that way everyone can grab any links they might have missed in the chat. Um and if you have any questions, please send us an email [email protected].

[00:57:23]And we would love to hear from you.

[00:57:26]Thank you so much, everyone.

[00:57:43]>> And now I'll just put a link in the chat to register for our future programs.

[00:57:54]One moment.

[00:58:03]All right.

[00:58:06]Great, there it is. All right, thank you so much everyone.