Jeffrey M. Green

This book tells the life story of an extremely engaging and charming Polish Jew, Shmuel Braw (1906-1992), who lived through the traumatic historical events that shaped Jewish experiences in the twentieth century. The story is told largely in Shmuel's own Yiddish- inflected Australian English to two avid listeners: Calvin Goldscheider, a social scientist, and Jeffrey M. Green, a writer and translator. Both the Holocaust and Shmuel's harrowing experience as a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia figure prominently in this book, but Shmuel also describes his community of Tarnow, a town in southeastern Poland, in rich detail. After World War II, Shmuel settled in Melbourne, Australia before eventually immigrating to Israel. Shmuel was lively, colorful, entertaining, deeply concerned about other people, and a devoted and kind family man. The book is true to Shmuel's spirit and shares the life of a man whom everyone fondly remembers as a typical extraordinary Jew.

Punctuated by thoughtful wit, this engaging volume of essays offers Jeffrey M. Green’s personal and theoretical ruminations on the profession of translation. Green begins many of the essays by relating the specific techniques and problems associated with translating from Hebrew texts. From this intimate perspective, he forges wise reflections on such subjects as identifying and preserving the writer’s voice, the cultural significance of translations and their contents, the research and travel that are part of a translator’s everyday life, and the frequent puzzles associated with the craft. Green combines a contemporary frankness about the financial, practical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of translation with an aspiration to write “like a good literary critic of the old school”—considering the moral and spiritual implications of the translation as well as its content. Thinking Through Translation shows us, with eloquent honesty, that translation is a delicate art and skill, and presents the trade as a way of attaining insight about history, the world, and oneself.

Trudi Berger was literally snatched from the flames of the Holocaust. At the age of fourteen her family was confined to a Lithuanian ghetto. A few years later she and her mother were sent off to the camps, suffering forced labour and the ever-present threat of death. This story of courage, determination, and hope is a powerful and moving memoir and that special bond between a mother and daughter.