THE WOMEN SHOPKEEPERS OR GOLDE-MINE, THE ABANDONED WIFE OF BROD BY AYZIK-MEIR DIK A Bilingual Yiddish/English Edition

“The addition of a fluid, accurate and entertaining English translation, side by side with the Yiddish text, calling attention through their meticulous selection of different typefaces to stylistic and editorial questions of great significance, make this text a model of its kind that will prove invaluable to both teaching and scholarship for many years. It is greatly to be hoped that, following this magnificent example, in time more of Dik’s tales will become available in English so that his best work may be valued afresh for its innovative and skilful storytelling, as well for as its informative cultural and historical value.” - Prof. Joseph Sherman, University of Oxford

“Lillian Schanfield and Paul Azaroff have quite ingeniously conflated the stylistically and orthographically modernized Niger text of 1954 with the original old-spelling and highly daytshmerish (germanified) text of 1865, giving us a text that is not only complete but that through the use of differential fonts illustrates clearly the excised qualities of the 1865 work. But they have gone further. They have produced a bilingual edition, the exceptionally well-prepared Yiddish text facing a footnoted English translation that is both accurate and felicitous. Dik has never been as accessible as he now is. For students of Yiddish and world literature there is now not only a splendid English version of a characteristic Dik story, but an accompanying critical introduction which squarely and perceptively identifies the many weaknesses, contradictions and paradoxes of the work – despite which its author is a writer of no mean stature.” – Prof. Leonard Prager, University of Haifa

“The edition of Dik’s text by Schanfield and Azaroff is a most valuable undertaking for it provides an English translation that is both close to the Yiddish original of 1865 and accessible even on the most arduous terrain of idiomatic expressions and rhymed passages. Their reconstruction of the Yiddish original, an achievement in itself, gives back the reader and, in particular, the specialist, an unabridged, full text, in modern Yiddish of Dik’s novella, something we did not have before. Their work sets a high standard in dealing with Yiddish literature of the 19th century. Showing how language, literature and even ethnography should be linked, this volume is exemplary and necessary.” – Prof. Daniela Mantovan, Hochschule für Jüdische Studien

Preface
Joseph Sherman
Introduction
Lillian Schanfield
Bilingual Yiddish/English Edition The Women Shopkeepers or Golde-Mine, the Abandoned Wife of Brod Ayzik-Meir Dik
Translators: Paul Azaroff and Lillian Schanfield

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