One wonders why Roth would select images from a pseudotranslation for this volume.

Was the

decision, in fact, a sort of wink toward the camera, a playful admission of guilt for the inquiring

contemporary reader, or, beyond the grave, toward the future collator of his work? Or was the

inclusion of these images purely pragmatic: he saw they were effective for marketing one

forgery, so why not for his own? Roth produces a space of unanswerable questions as his legacy.

At first glance, it can be tempting to group “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” with

Pogany’s Bilitis or James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, relatively poor forgeries which

purported an ancient source. A simple explanation for their provenance would be that

“Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” were fabricated by Roth or by someone in his employ.

And if this were true, the case would likely be closed . . . but two pamphlets, written in Yiddish

and published at the turn of the century by the Hebrew Publishing Company, make this story all

the more strange.

***

Even if you are a student of Yiddish literature, there is a good chance you have never heard the

name Dovid-Moyshe Hermalin. He, like Roth, was an immigrant to America. He came from

Romania in 1885, when he was twenty years old, and died when Roth was seventeen. One is

tempted to imagine a meeting between the two, perhaps in a cafeteria on the Lower East Side,

where you could get stewed fruit: the Yiddish writer in the last year of his life and the young

correspondent for the New York Globe. But, with no record of its occurrence, to describe such a

meeting is pure fabulation. Though Hermalin was among the most prolific and popular Yiddish

men of letters in his day, he has been all but forgotten. This is likely because his writings would

be classified post facto as shund, and thus excluded from the Yiddish canon.

Literally, shund derives from a German term referring to the unusable remnants of an animal left

over after slaughter and processing, but in Yiddish it means, more or less, “trash literature”, or

perhaps more generously “pulp fiction”.8 Shund literature usually appeared in newspapers, and

the stories were often titillating, full of sex and suspense, and written to sell. Around the turn of
the century, vocal Yiddish intellectuals began to rail against shund, decrying it a poor

representative of Jewish culture and deleterious for the impressionable Yiddish-reading public.

This was a common critique: shund literature was too indebted to European models, too bound

up in translation, to be properly Jewish. It did not conform to a politics of Jewish national

autonomy. According to the leading Yiddish intellectuals at the time, Jewish literature, like the

Jewish people, needed be one among many, on the same plane as the peoples and literatures of

Europe, not dependent on or subservient to them. The Yiddish authors who have been canonized,

and therefore disproportionately translated, are those whose work conformed, mainly, to a non-

shund model. Recent projects have tried to turn the tide of research away from canonical Yiddish

literature and toward shund, acknowledging its central position in the reading lives of Yiddish

speakers and recovering its visibility.9

Hermalin wrote shund novels alongside works of popular philosophy and journalism, but it

seems his real specialty was the translation or adaptation of popular European authors for the

Yiddish-reading public. In our database of translations into Yiddish, we have so far identified

twenty-four such works. He wrote “adaptations” of Goethe, Conan Doyle, Swift, Maupassant,

Zola, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and, as you might have guessed, Boccaccio. He generally worked

with the Hebrew Publishing Company of New York, one of the most prolific producers of

Yiddish reading material during those boom times, when various Czars’ censors, all but banning

the Yiddish publishing within Russia, inadvertently turned New York into the printing press for

the Yiddish world.

 Illustration by Willy Pogany for Pierre Louÿs’ pseudotranslation of Bilitis,
credited as a work by Aubrey Beardsley in Pasquerella and Madonna
Babetta (1927) — Source.

Around the turn of the century, Hermalin produced two adaptations of

Boccaccio: Paskarela with the press of B. Rabinovits, and Madam Babeta with the Hebrew

Publishing Company. In contrast to Roth’s “hitherto untranslated”, it is stated on the cover page

of both stories that Hermalin had “baarbet” (adapted) these works from Boccaccio. This gives

him a little wiggle room, though the introduction to Madam Babeta does explicitly state that it is

“one of the best stories from the Decameron”.

Paskarela and Madam Babeta are longer versions of those same stories that Roth printed in

English twenty-seven years later. Unless some proto-version of these two stories surfaces, the

most likely explanation seems to be that the tales were composed by Hermalin as

pseudotranslations of Boccaccio, and that Roth (or someone close to him) translated these stories

and passed them off once more as authentic, lost stories by Boccaccio. By birth a Galician Jew,

Roth knew Yiddish, and used Yiddish sources to produce translations of Heinrich Heine, since

he had no German.10 He was also an inveterate publisher of phony translations, with sensational
titles such as 1941’s I Was Hitler’s Doctor and 1951’s My Sister and I, supposedly a lost work

by Nietzsche. He had the means, the motivation, and the sheer brazenness necessary to take a

pair of Yiddish fakes, translate them into English, and pass them off as genuine discoveries to an

unsuspecting literary public.11

Roth was situated in a strange middle place. The free way he dealt with authorship has much in

common with the prior generation of Jewish-American literary production. He would have done

well with the Hebrew Publishing Company, where, for example, Thomas Mayne Reid was

falsely presented as Jules Verne, and German adventure novels were published as the work of
Jewish authors.12

Of course, if Roth were to market Hermalin’s pseudo-Boccaccio to his literary, anglophone

market, the stories would have to be adapted. The English versions are significantly shorter than

the Yiddish (in the case of “Pasquerella”, seventeen vs. eighty-three pages), and the style of the

English is significantly more reserved. The Yiddish narrator delights in parables — he

philosophizes on the incontinence of human nature, on inexorable desire, and he often addresses

the reader directly. At one point, he asks us: “Have you ever plucked a rose from a bush? Yes?”

and then uses the rest of the paragraph to compare Pasquerella to that rose. Roth’s version,

conversely, sticks to indirect, third-person narration, and pretends toward a sort of Anglo-Saxon

dignity. For example, that same rose simile is retained in the English, but it is framed instead as

“Whoever has plucked a rose from its branch . . .” The Yiddish version is also significantly more

explicit in its descriptions. Hermalin describes the large bosoms, plump arms, and broad

shoulders of Pasquerella and Babetta with relish, over and over, and the blood of their murdered

victims is bright red and comes forth in lurid sprays. Roth, publishing for a public with literary

pretensions, seemed to think it wise to tone down the extravagance.13

 Illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, originally published in the 1892 Dent edition
of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, reproduced in Pasquerella and Madonna
Babetta (1927) as previously unseen sketches — left, right.

Had Roth wanted, he certainly could have found other famous works of questionable provenance

in the Yiddish press. Hermalin produced two more Boccaccio “adaptations” entitled Printsesin

Tsuleyka (Princess Zuleika) and Di Tsvey Poorlakh (The Two Couples). Printsesin Tsuleyka is

actually a significantly expanded adaptation of a real story from the Decameron: the seventh

story of the second day, about the Sultan of Babylon who sent his daughter Alatiel to the King of

Algarve as a wife. But under Hermalin’s hand, Alatiel’s name changes to Zuleika, which also

happens to be the traditional name for Potiphar’s wife, the Egyptian woman who tried to seduce

Joseph. This biblical story is referenced in both versions of Babetta, and seems to have exerted a

special force on Hermalin. And how could it not have? Being, as it is, one of the shund-ier parts

of the Hebrew bible.14

 ***

“Madonna Babetta” and “Pasquerella”, in Yiddish and in English, are but two of countless

examples of unlicensed literary appropriations. And although they are, in a sense, rather poor

forgeries, they reveal the curious and irreverent ways in which literature is reproduced and kept

alive across the boundaries of class and nation by means of adaptation. Boccaccio was an adapter

himself: he took material for the Decameron from the whole wealth of narratives that were

available to him — from French, Italian, and Latin sources — which in turn adapted stories of

non-European origin, probably composed in Arabic and Sanskrit.15 Boccaccio reworked them as

he saw fit, and wove them together to create his opus. The Decameron itself was an anthology of

adaptations, held together by a well-wrought frame narrative.

A history of translation is incomplete without a proper charting of the muddied streams of

unlicensed adaptation, false attribution, and pseudotranslation. Born beside on tributary of the

Dniester and buried near the Hudson, Roth, like Hermalin, called this contentious space home.

As did Boccaccio, some six-hundred years prior. But while the Decameron has been thoroughly

canonized, the texts that Roth, Hermalin, and their comrades produced by these practices have

been forgotten, relegated to the dustbin of literary studies as shund, marginalized as curiosities.

A shame, because texts of this sort constituted an outsized proportion of the material that readers

actually read. Texts like these, and not the canonized classics, were the bread and butter of the

popular press. To understand the functions and methods of translation as they were and are —

not as they are supposed to be — we must turn attention to these stories.

Boccaccio, Hermalin, and Roth all belong to the same tradition. They are collators, adaptors,

collectors, and tellers of tales. And if we are to study them, then we must be too. All the more so

because Hermalin and Roth did not provide frame narratives for their stories: they published no

acknowledgements with their texts; none of that sinew which connects the femur to the hip.

Perhaps out of piety, that fleshy byproduct, the origin of shund, was thrown away. So it is up to

us to produce the frame story for Hermalin and Roth — to bring bones together, put tendons and
flesh upon them. This is done by problematizing these fraught and fascinating moments of

transmission: fleshing out the story. Or, otherwise, by fishing around in the trash.