The Jewish Don Quixote? Mendele’s 'The Brief Travels of Benjamin III'

Tuition: $165 | YIVO members: $125**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be accessible in Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website.

Instructor: Josh Price

This course will offer a close reading of Kitser masoes Binyomen hashlishi (The Brief Travels of Benjamin III), the 1878 novel by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (also known as Mendele Moykher-Sforim).

Inspired by famous traveling Benjamins of yore (12th and mid-19th century), the novel’s title character and his sidekick Senderl di yidene are as eager to find the descendants of the legendary Ten Lost Tribes as they are to escape their domineering wives. That they never make it more than a few towns over provides the occasion for Abramovitsh’s grand satire of shtetl life, in which a single exotic date fruit prompts mass longing for the Holy Land, the bathhouse is a forum for world politics, and Jewish effeminacy becomes resistance against Czarist conscription.

The novel will be read both in relation to Abramovitsh’s evolving corpus and the European traditions he wrote though. (The novel’s title in Polish translation became The Jewish Don Quixote!) In this class, students will consider what Abramovitsh — and his narrator Mendele — may have to tell us about Jewish exile in all its impossible and inevitable longevity.

Yiddish Level:
This course will be conducted in English. The seminar will work mainly with Hillel Halkin’s English translation of the novel. But, the class’s mode of reading will permit and encourage those with intermediate or advanced Yiddish literacy to read the original text in Yiddish and bring insights to bear on the discussion.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course material, including primary sources and a bibliography of secondary sources, digitally throughout the class on Canvas. Hillel Halkin’s translation of The Brief Travels of Benjamin III may be found in Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler, available to download online.

Joshua Price is a lector in Yiddish at Yale. He received his Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies at Columbia, with a dissertation on the translation of world literature into Yiddish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through studies of the relationship between translation and original writing in canonical figures (Mendele—Jules Verne, Der Nister—Hans Christian Andersen, Isaac Bashevis Singer—Thomas Mann, etc.), distant readings of translations produced and discussed in and across literary markets (Warsaw, New York, Moscow), and close(r) readings of the shift from (pre-)maskilic norms of Judaization to modern and contested standards of “fidelity,” his dissertation examines the desired and intermittently realized modernization and “normalization” of Yiddish literature on the world stage.

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