The Ilan Stavans Collection

Recent Accession

by ABE GOLD

This photo is the first page of Mi Diario, an autobiographical work by Ilan Stavans’s paternal grandmother, Bela Stavchansky. Ilan Stavans, prolific writer, translator, editor, critic, and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, donated his archive to YIVO this spring, and my first job as a summer intern for the YIVO Archives was to process, arrange, and digitize it. Stavans’s grandmother and her works are well represented in the collection. “Yo naci in a kleyn shtetl,” Mi Diario begins, an example of the multilingualism Stavans was raised in and has so frequently written about (“Yiddish, for me, was truly the mother tongue, whereas Spanish, the street language, was the father tongue,” he writes, in his English-language memoir).

The collection itself spans six languages. Most of the documents are connected to Mexico City, where Stavans’s grandparents immigrated to from Eastern Europe and where Stavans grew up. When I noted to one of the archivists the difficulty in processing a collection that includes languages I didn’t know, he said that language acquisition “comes with the need,” a sentiment about archiving that I found quite beautiful (although it didn’t help in deciphering the Polish postcard in my hand). I learned so much in the past month and am very grateful to YIVO and the archivists there that helped and taught me.

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Abe Gold is an intern at the YIVO Archives.