ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: Why did Abraham Karpinowitz write about Vilna’s “ordinary” people?

Helen Mintz is an internationally acclaimed solo artist, storyteller, translator from Yiddish to English and teacher based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last week she spoke with us about Yiddish writer Abraham Karpinowitz and her translation of his work. This week she is speaking with us about the city of Vilna, now Vilnius, in Lithuania, where Karpinowitz lived and wrote between the wars. Vilna was known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania” and was a very important center for Jewish and Yiddish culture until World War II. The city itself plays an important role in Karpinowitz’s writings, which give us a taste of the vibrant Jewish life, at all levels, that was soon to disappear.