08. “Three Passover Tales” by Sholem Aleichem

Between Wanderings Collection, 2021. Translated from Yiddish to English by Steven Capsuto.

I don’t usually translate from Yiddish because there are other people who do that far faster than I can. But business was quiet during lockdown and I had time, so I translated these three wonderfully contrasting short stories set around the Jewish holiday of Passover.

The collection begins with a satiric tale: “An Early Passover” is a fish-out-of-water story about a Hasidic refugee from Eastern Europe who suddenly finds himself living among middle-class Reform Jews in 1908 Germany and must find a way to earn a living there. “A Village Passover,” a poetic story, explores the idyllic friendship between a little Jewish boy and a little Christian boy in the Ukrainian countryside, amid conflicts between their parents during Passover and Easter. It touches on themes of Jewish survival and on questions about what it means to be a Jew. “The Lovebirds” is a genre unto itself: a Passover horror fantasy involving food, death, and kidnapping.

The book concludes with excerpts from the author’s own Passover letters to family members, expressing his longing to have “everyone, absolutely everyone, together at the Seder.”