Harry Potter is considered the most successful book series in history and can be found on the bookshelf of almost every western-oriented home with children. It is also considered the most translated series in history, having been translated into over 80 languages, including Gaelic, ancient Greek, and Latin. About two years ago, a Yiddish translation of Harry Potter was published by a Swedish publishing house with the support of the Swedish government. Both the publisher and the translator were ambivalent about the project, knowing that few Yiddish speakers in the world today are not affiliated with closed Ultra-Orthodox, hassidic communities. They were struck with astonishment after every last copy of the book was sold within 48 hours of publication. "It's crazy; it's hard to believe," wrote publisher Nicholas Olniansky on Facebook, after announcing that a second edition is already in the process of being printed. "We didn't think we could sell more than a thousand copies of a non-hassidic book in Yiddish." Olniansky mentioned that the first edition of the book was bought by people from Israel, Poland, Sweden, Australia, China, and even Morocco.
At this stage, there was a wave of curiosity amongst the public regarding this Harry Potter translation project. The background of the translator was the main mystery, given that very few no-Ultra-Orthodox Jews are native Yiddish speakers and would be able to translate from English to Yiddish. Arun Viswanath, 31, is a scion of one of America’s greatest Yiddish dynasties. His grandfather, Mordkhe Schaechter, was a professor of Yiddish at Columbia University, and together with his family, devoted his life to propagating the language and its literature. Viswanath’s mother, Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, is the author of the 856-page Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary. His aunt, Rukhl Schaechter, is the editor of the Yiddish Forverts, the sole remaining non-hassidic Yiddish newspaper. Arun’s father, an Indian economist from Bombay, went to the United States for graduate school, discovered Judaism, and made his way into a Yiddishist society, where he met Gitl Schaechter. The Schaechter-Viswanath family raised their kids as native Yiddish speakers.
Today, Aron and his sisters are actively preserving the Yiddish language, as they have made their mother tongue their profession. But it wasn’t easy to be the only children in the neighborhood who speak a language that has no presence in the public sphere. It is difficult to feel intimacy with a language in which almost no fiction books are published.
At the age of 29 Viswanath decided that in order for the Yiddish world to be truly alive, Harry Potter had to be translated into Yiddish. He wrote a letter to the publishing house in London that owns the translation rights for Harry Potter, explaining his motivation for translating the book into Yiddish:
“Having grown up with Yiddish as a mother tongue, I always wished that I could experience the magical world of witchcraft and wizardry in my beloved language. Modern, engaging children’s literature was practically non-existent; instead, my siblings and I, along with our Yiddish-speaking peers, had to make do with outdated works, often dating back before World War II. In fact, the idea for this project came out of a Saturday afternoon conversation with my wife as we were sitting in our living room rereading various books from the series; she turned to me and said, ‘How are we going to raise our kids in a language that doesn’t have Harry Potter?’ I am also painfully aware of the lack of accessible pedagogical material for adult students, being a Yiddish teacher myself. As with the translations into Latin and Ancient Greek, a translation of Harry Potter into Yiddish would provide students with a modern, familiar, and exciting mode to practice and engage with the language, and generate additional enthusiasm for the study of Yiddish.”
After receiving approval, he turned to the work of translation. He researched the seven books of the series, and decided that the context into which Harry Potter would be translated would be Yiddish-speaking Europe before World War II. The characters would not be Jewish, but the older, learned figures, such as the principal, Dumbledore, would sometimes use Aramaic and Hebrew expressions in their speech – a characteristic of scholars and rabbinical figures in the Yiddish world of that time.
The Olniansky Tekst Farlag publishing house is now printing the second edition of the book for a second time, after it was sold within a month.
During his interview for Tablet magazine, Viswanath explained his hopes, as an educator and professional Yiddish teacher, regarding the book’s translation:
“As part of the process of trying to get the copyright, I called up the Hawaiian translator [Keao NeSmith], who is this remarkable guy. He learned Hawaiian from his grandmother when he was 18. Very few people still speak Hawaiian at this point. Most people on the mainland don’t; there’s this island where there’s still a self-sufficient Hawaiian community. But he learned Hawaiian from his grandmother to fluency, and he translated Harry Potter, and it really raised the status of Hawaiian as a minority language, and it gave the broader Hawaiian community a lot of pride.
“Now, Yiddish has produced world-class literature that parallels most major languages, so it’s silly to say ‘I want to raise the status of Yiddish.’ But my hope is that people should know that Yiddish is this vibrant thing and it’s relevant today.”
In this week’s Parashat HaShavua we read about the Tower of Babel. The story describes a group of people who settled in Shin’ar, after the Flood, and tried to build a very tall tower in order to reach God, but He stopped their enterprise by "confusing their language". The builders couldn't communicate with each other anymore, and they dispersed all over the world. The story describes the starting point where humanity stopped speaking in one language and moved to using multiple different languages. Many interpretations have been offered for this grand biblical narrative, one of which suggests that the use of a single language allows people to coalesce around common ideas and challenges and form a common identity and goal. When the Yiddish language disappeared from the cultural space of the post-Holocaust generation, a void was created, and the language was slowly forgotten, along with chunks of the unique Ashkenazi Jewish identity. In recent years, educational entrepreneurs and Yiddish lovers are renewing Yiddish culture, creating a movement that is continuously growing.