By the end of the nineteenth century, with the advent of movements of Jewish revitalization in what Benjamin Harshav has termed “a modern Jewish revolution,” Yiddish had expanded from a primarily spoken language into a complete modern culture with belles-lettres, theatre, educational institutions and popular press (see Harshav, 1993). Yiddish texts consisted largely of popular literature and translations of texts officially designated for those who could not access loshn-koydesh texts women and men illiterate in Hebrew-Aramaic (see Harshav, 1990 Weinreich, 2008). Yiddish existed in a symbiotic relationship with loshn-koydesh (the Holy Tongue, pre-modern Hebrew and Aramaic), which functioned as the sacred language of study and prayer. Originating in medieval German lands as a Jewish Diaspora language, Yiddish served as the lingua franca of much of Ashkenazi Jewry (Jews with roots in Germanic lands) in its thousand-year geographic spread eastwards and its eventual expansion into the world’s largest Jewish community.
With the considerable decline of the language as vernacular in recent decades, much emphasis has been placed on translation out of Yiddish into other vernaculars. This study examines Petrushka’s Mishnayes as an unintended cultural artefact: what began as a work of popularization ended as a tribute to the vanished world of Polish Jewry. By the time his magnum opus appeared in print, the European Yiddish heartland was in ruins in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust and the language was facing global attrition. A brilliant scholar and a prolific journalist in Warsaw, Petrushka produced his most significant works after his arrival in Canada as a refugee on the eve of World War II. Using translation into Yiddish-the language of the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe and its émigré centres worldwide-Petrushka set out to render Jewish knowledge accessible to a wide readership. In 1945-as European Jewry lay in ashes-Polish-born Montreal scholar Symcha Petrushka published the first volume of his Mishnayes mit iberzetsungen un peyrush in yidish ( The Mishna with Translation and Commentary in Yiddish), a groundbreaking popular rendition of a core text of the Jewish textual tradition, from its original Hebrew into the modern Yiddish vernacular.
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