Miriam Karpilove and the Yiddish Newspaper, with Jessica Kirzane

When the young narrator of Miriam Karpilove’s A Provincial Newspaper leaves New York to work for a new Yiddish newspaper in Massachusetts, she expects to be treated with respect as a professional writer. Instead she finds herself underpaid and overworked. In this slapstick novella, Karpilove’s narrator lampoons the gaggle of blundering publishers and editors who put her through the wringer and spit her back out again. In this talk, Kirzane will discuss Karpilove’s satire of the Yiddish newspaper workplace together with a selection of short stories Karpilove published in the Forverts in the 1930s, during her time as a staff writer at that newspaper.

Jessica Kirzane is the assistant instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago. She is the editor in chief of In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. She earned her PhD in Yiddish studies from Columbia University in 2017. Kirzane is an alumna of the Yiddish Book Center many times over: she was a Steiner summer intern in 2007, a 2017 translation fellow, and a 2018 pedagogy fellow, and she teaches in the Great Jewish Books summer school program. She is the translator of three works by Miriam Karpilove: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle against Free Love (Syracuse UP, 2020), Judith: A Tale of Love and Woe (Farlag Press, 2022), and A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press, forthcoming).