11. “Scenes of Jewish Life in Alsace,” a book by Daniel Stauben

Between Wanderings Collection, 2018. 223 pp. Translated from French to English by Steven Capsuto.

The author of these charming stories grew up in a picturesque Yiddish-speaking village in 1830s France. His tales evoke the people and folkways of a rural Jewish world that was vanishing quickly.

In these stories, we meet Salomon, Yedele and their loved ones. We share their joys, losses, courtships and holiday celebrations. We also meet traditional Alsatian storytellers who recount Yiddish folk tales of ghosts and sorcery, and of “wonder rabbis” who could banish demons and lift curses.

This new English translation restores the Yiddishisms and Jewish wording that the author deleted in the 1850s when reworking the stories for a largely Gentile audience. This edition also adds illustrations by Alphonse Lévy, a 19th-century Alsatian Jewish artist whose drawings and etchings mesh perfectly with the tales.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Auguste Widal (1822-1875), who used the pen name Daniel Stauben, was born in Wintzenheim in the Alsace region of eastern France. He studied in Colmar and Paris and spent his professional life as a professor of classics and modern languages. His “Letters on Alsatian Customs” began appearing in the French Jewish magazine Archives Israélites in 1849. Widal used the pseudonym Daniel Stauben when he expanded the stories into Scenes of Jewish Life in Alsace. He also used that pen name for his French translations of Leopold Kompert’s Jewish story collections Aus dem Ghetto (In the ghetto) and Böhmische Juden (Jews of Bohemia). Widal died in Paris at the age of fifty-three.