ABSTRACT
In Cynthia Ozick’s 58 page long short story, ‘Envy; or, Yiddish in America’, Hersh Edelshtein is desperately seeking a translator. Though he is forty years in America, he continues to write in Yiddish, his mamaloshen – mother tongue – for he admits he is no Kosinski or Nabokov (Ozick 1969; 1971: 52). He will always remain green inside (52) and therefore outside of English. But it is not merely that he cannot, technically, compose good poetry in his adopted English. Yiddish, as mamaloshen and the literature it has inspired since the 1500s, is his ‘substitute for religion and statehood, it [is] a State in itself, “Yiddishland”; to abandon it [is] to abandon the whole culture’ (Harshav 1990: 136). This would be, for Edelshtein, an act of unconscionable treason, tantamount to patri-or, as some may insist, matricide.1
