I began the summer of 2017 fresh out of my Junior year at Smith and terrified of flying abroad, alone. I didn’t want to get lost in a country where everyone spoke Hebrew (even though I was assured frequently that everyone also knew English. It turned out to be true, but I’m a worry-wart). I didn’t want to miss a flight or get ripped off by a cab driver. Most importantly, I wanted to do well in my first class overseas. I wanted to make connections with Yiddish professors from all over the globe, something that I hadn’t been exposed to at the National Yiddish Book Center (as much as I would have liked, anyway). The program was huge, so I also wanted to make connections with people older than me, different than me, from other countries, with other ideas. In the end I was successful in doing these things. I completed my coursework and enjoyed it, I explored Israel with my Yiddish speaking friends, I met people from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, Berlin, New York City, and St. Petersburg, all of whom were also looking to make new friends from exciting places. I learned that I could travel alone with ease, and with my newfound self-confidence I applied myself, learning from those ahead of me and teaching to those behind me. To my surprise (after what I was taught about historical views of Yiddish in Israel) I wasn’t ridiculed for my choice of study by locals. Young folks found it cool and interesting, and related it to their liberal politics, and older folks seemed more surprised than condescending.

One of the most interesting things about my month in Israel was the fact that I was learning a Jewish language surrounded by yet another Jewish language, a very rare situation in the life of a young, secular academic. One of the joys of my experience was puzzling that out emotionally and intellectually. It was also very, very tiring to be surrounded constantly by a language that I didn’t understand.

My second “ah-ha!” moment came in Tel Aviv, as well. I’ve been a listener of Sosye Fox’s podcast “Vaybertaytsh,” a feminist podcast produced entirely in Yiddish, for as long as I’ve been a Yiddish student. To my surprise, Sosye was also in Tel Aviv, and quickly organized an opportunity for people to participate in her work. She created the “Far vos?” [“Why?”] series of episodes, in which those of us whom she interviewed could explain why we came to Yiddish, why we love Yiddish, or why we struggle with Yiddish. We split into small groups based on interests, and I was happy to find people with a shared interest: What does it mean to be queer in Yiddish? What about being trans in Yiddish? We each brought to the table different views, and some of us even came up with a queer Yiddish vocabulary. This was the first time I created in Yiddish, and that was the true “ah-ha!”, but listening to myself on the air was pretty cool, too.

Once I got back to Smith College, I became enveloped entirely within the world of my Honors Thesis, a translation of several short stories from Rikudah Potash’s collection In geslekh fun Yerushalayim [In the Alleyways of Jerusalem]. I went into it looking for an under-appreciated, under-studied woman Yiddish writer. I am now writing my critical introduction to the text, which begins with a short introduction to the study of Yiddish women writers and how Potash expresses womanhood and femininity in her work as central to her sense of self. It then goes on to what I consider to be the much more interesting layers of her work, which are the racial and cultural components, as well as her writing about disability. It’s very rare to discuss disability studies within the framework of Yiddish literature, but I’ve found many older pieces of Yiddish literature (for example, Rebbe Nachman’s story “The Seven Beggars,”) that show that there is a great need for attention to disability studies in our little field. I’ve also been able to learn about orientalism in Israel, something that I’ve never bumped into in my Eastern European-leaning studies. It complicates the things that I was initially taught about Yiddish from my language teachers. Yiddish as the “under dog” is a good narrative for young Yiddish learners, but gets much more complicated as you move historically out of America or Europe. It’s exciting to know that I will be among the very short list of people who have written so extensively about Rikudah Potash’s work, and especially one of the only translators to have worked with her prose.

Teddy Schneider is a senior at Smith College. Their focus on Yiddish literature allows them to explore themes of disability, womanhood, history, genre, geography, borders, and marginality. After they graduate, they would like to go to graduate school for library and information sciences, or further their studies of disability in Yiddish literature. Their senior thesis is a translation of Rikudah Potash’s collection of short stories, “In geslekh fun Yerusholayim [In the Alleyways of Jerusalem]” complete with a critical literary analysis.

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