Dubbed Jewish Literature: Multilingualism, Translation, and Hopelessness in Twentieth-Century Hebrew and Yiddish Writing

Early twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish writers strived to create the kind of psychologically nuanced narrative worlds they had encountered in European literature. However, writing in marginal languages, they faced a paradox: achieving psychological realism when the language of narration differs from the spoken language(s) of the story world. My dissertation examines how Yiddish and Hebrew writers of the twentieth century bridged the persistent gap between the spoken language of the story world and the written language on the page. I focus on the strategy of “literary dubbing” in the representation of speech. Dubbed literature refers to prose written through a translational process where authors render characters' speech in a narrational language distinct from the spoken diegetic languages. My analysis explores literary dubbing in texts by Uri Nissan Gnessin, Dovid Bergelson, Hava Shapiro, Rivke Rus, S.L. Blank, and Aaron Zeitlin. This research investigates the complex relationships across Jewish and non-Jewish languages, native and foreign languages. Tracing this evolution from the multilingual lives of 'at-home' Hebrew and Yiddish writers (and their characters) through the profound shift reflecting Jewish immigrant hardship, it reveals the deep alienation and hopelessness caused by a lack of linguistic belonging. I investigate how dubbed literature provides more than a technical solution to literary representation of multilingualism. Instead, I argue, it is a powerful testament to the unresolved tension of linguistic identity within Jewish modernism, faced by authors striving to represent a multifaceted Jewish experience in a world demanding linguistic singularity. Studying both well-known texts and introducing a previously unstudied corpus, I argue that Jewish writers of that time, both Hebrew and Yiddish, across the world participated in active attempts to create a monolingual Jewish literature to elevate their language, suppressing other languages in the process. As they grappled with the tension between their desired language and their everyday language, they exposed the impossibility of multilingualism and their state of linguistic homelessness.

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