ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – Many countries observe Mother’s Day in May, so this week we are celebrating with a special story, by a writer whom you may not know.
Chaver Paver is the pen name of the American Yiddish writer Gershon Einbinder. He was born in Bershad, Bessarabia, in 1901. In 1919 he moved to Romania, where he worked as a teacher and in 1923 he emigrated to the United States. He lived in New York and Los Angeles, where he died in 1964. He made his debut in Yiddish literature in the mid-1920s as a writer of stories for children, and the first two volumes of these stories appeared in 1925. Although he continued to write for children, the bulk of his literary works, 10 volumes, were stories and novels for adults.
The road of the early Yiddish writers in the United States, in the late 19th century, was in a sense more difficult than that of their European counterparts, because of the lack of cultural and literary tradition in their new country. Each generation of these writers had to deal with the two basic traumatic experiences of immigrant life: separation from the old country and the painful search for roots in the new one. We find both of these elements in Chaver Paver’s story, “A Hollywood Mother”.
It is from the book Clinton Street and Other Stories, translated by Henry Goodman and published by YKUF Publishers in 1974.
