Shelf Unbound October/November 2013 October 2013 | Page 30

translations

hebrew

I

t’s been decades since the parents
and grandparents of young Israelis—
our parents and grandparents—came
to Israel and were thrown into what was
then proudly called the melting pot of
culture, to become full-fledged Israelis of
no competing origin or tradition. Luckily,
some things stuck, such as traditional
food and diverging religious traditions.
Despite these celebrated differences,
the population centering around Tel Aviv
sometimes fails to acknowledge the rift
of inequality that remains. In a country
of less than eight million, the crossing of
which takes about seven hours by car, we
Some Day
assume there is no margin, no place for
by Shemi Zarhin secrets to be kept.
translated from the Hebrew
In Some Day, Shemi Zarhin reveals the
by Yardenne Greenspan life of a Sephardic family in Tiberias, a
northern city on the shores of the Sea
New Vessel Press
of Galilee. A city lost in time and space,
www.newvesselpress.com
whose trials and tribulations rarely make
it to the national news; a city surrounded
by kibbutz settlements, the Ashkenazy
inhabitants of which are convinced that they are solely responsible for building Israel, ignoring the decades and often centuries that their Sephardic
counterparts’ ancestors have spent in the Holy Land. Zarhin shouts out
what has been kept silent and is still being buried beneath the more commonly-told European immigrant narrative, the happinesses and tragedies we
don’t normally hear about.
In translating Some Day, Zarhin and I made a point of maintaining dominant Sephardic heritage and lingo. We kept almost all original food names,
Arabic slang and Ladino spellings. For example, Zarhin insisted that I find a
non-Yiddish alternative to the commonly-used “yahrzeit” as a translation for
the Hebrew ner neshama—memorial candle. We used every word-choice
challenge as an opportunity to stay true to the story and its characters, to
the lives they lead and the language they speak, even in translation.
—?Yardenne Greenspan
28

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013