Jessica Kirzane reads her translation of “Mutual Consent,” an excerpt from Diary of a Lonely Girl by Miriam Karpilov.
Miriam Karpilov (1888-1956) was born in Minsk and immigrated to America in 1905, settling in New York City and in Bridgeport, CT, where several of her brothers lived. Karpilov wrote short stories, belles-lettres, plays, and novels that were published in leading American-Yiddish newspapers and served as a staff writer for the Yiddish daily newspaper the Forward in the 1930s. Five of her novels appeared in book form: Brokhe, a kleyn-shtetldike (Brokhe, a Small-town Girl, 1923), In di shturem teg (In Stormy Days, 1909), A provints-tsaytung (A Provincial Newspaper, 1926), Tagebukh fun an elender meydl, oder der kamf kegn fraye libe (Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love, 1918), Yudis (Judith, 1911). Only one of her short stories has ever appeared in English translation (“In a Friendly Hamlet,” trans. Myra Mniewski, Have I Got a Story for You (W. W. Norton, 2016).
Jessica Kirzane is an incoming lecturer in Yiddish Studies at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. She is Managing/Pedagogy Editor of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies and was a 2017 Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. Her translations have previously appeared or are forthcoming in In geveb, Pakn Treger, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and Have I Got a Story For You (W. W. Norton, 2016).