Translation, I believe, is about interaction, interaction between one language and another, between one form of writing and another. It is the most o… - Chava Rosenfarb

Yiddish is my own language, as near to me as the skin on my body. In my youth, when I voraciously read the works of the great European writers, they all spoke to me in Yiddish, because I read them in Yiddish translation. Yiddish was my Esperanto, my key to understanding the lives of other peoples. It established the affinity between them and me, giving me an entree into the obscurest corners of the human soul. To me, Yiddish was never a parochial language. On the contrary, Yiddish literature was a splendid edifice, with open doors and windows.

The girl possesses a carefree lightheartedness that makes Barukh feel more acutely the weight of the despair that he carries within himself.

What affects me most is the continual sense of isolation that I feel as a Holocaust survivor, an isolation enhanced by my being a Yiddish writer. I feel myself to be an anachronism, wandering across a page of history where I do not really belong. If writing is a lonely profession, the Yiddish writer's loneliness has an additional dimension. Her readership has perished. Her language has gone up with the smoke of the crematoria. She creates in a vacuum, almost without a readership, out of fidelity to a vanished language, as if to prove that Nazism did not succeed in extinguishing that language's last breath, that it is still alive. Creativity is a life-affirming activity. Lack of response to creativity and being condemned to write for the desk drawer is a stifling, destructive experience. Sandwiched between these two misfortunes struggles the spirit of the contemporary Yiddish writer.