Translator’s Note

This piece represents my effort to bring together Jewish resistance to Zionism and experimental translation. I first read Eliezer Shteynbarg in an attempt to grow familiar with Romanian and especially Bessarabian Yiddish literature, what the literary researcher and editor Shmuel Rozhanski has called "the wandering youngest brother of Yiddish." I am of Bessarabian Jewish ancestry myself, and hoped to find in my approach to Shteynbarg, the great fabulist of Chernivtsi ---now in Ukraine --- some kind of fellow feeling, something familiar. Instead, in that search for familiarity, I found "The Fist," a fable of a Hammer's repetitive, gleeful violence against a piece of Iron, who tries to appeal to their shared metallic origin, and so, I found a voice for satirizing this moment of Israel's genocide in Gaza. So far in my research, I haven't found solid evidence of Shteynbarg's views on Zionism, and neither I nor anyone can speak to what he would think of me bringing his fable to bear on the idea of the Jewish state becoming the occupiers and oppressors of the Palestinian people and their land. Instead of appealing to authorial intent, I appeal to my experience as a reader, reflected in the three versions, from Trot to Translation to Explosion, which reflect my process. While it is possible this process has carried me away from the intended effect of the work, from the values of the author, it has produced a new effect, which I feel the words can hold. In a similar process and manner, my lived experience of Judaism, Jewish culture, Yiddishkeit, and other related commitments has led to a staunch opposition to Zionism. That opposition, in turn, leads to me being accused by my fellow Jews of ignorance, recklessness, betrayal. All of these accusations are familiar to the experimental translator.  

—Mordecai Martin