Ken Frieden, Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016. 389 pp.

Hayim Nahman Bialik, the great modernist Hebrew poet, is purported to have compared learning Hebrew through translation to kissing a woman through a veil. Travels in Translation, Ken Frieden’s marvelous, creative, and erudite book on the signal role played by heretofore neglected Hebrew and Yiddish “translations” of sea journeys—and their shipwrecks—in the origins of modern Hebrew literary history, proves the master wrong. These works, both formal translations from one written text into another and informal “translations” or adaptations of oral material into a new, written form, are a full-fledged literary, cultural, ideological, and religious love affair. En route through the artistry of Nathan Sternharz (Nahman of Bratslav’s secretary), Isaac Euchel, Moses Mendelsohn-Frankfurt, and Frieden’s hero, Mendel Lefin of Satanów, Frieden rewrites the beginnings of modern Hebrew prose. He shows how Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovich), long credited as the founding father of the revolution in modernizing Hebrew, had precursors in hasidic sea journeys and Haskalah translations, both of which had an intimate relationship to Yiddish, and the latter with a debt to German travelogues. Along the way, Frieden, in a deliberate post-Zionist move, redirects our attention to the vitality of postbiblical Hebrew in the diaspora. Although interested in reorienting Hebrew literary history, Frieden pays attention to the lived reality of his protagonists, showing their rootedness in Eastern Europe, specifically in Polish Podolia and Austrian Galicia, the heartland of Polish Hasidism and the most densely settled Jewish geographic space of the period. Frieden calls his method “textual referentialism” (pp. xix, 260–261); because classic literary studies often separated literary meaning from “mundane reality,” Frieden presses his demand for interpreting these texts in their historical context as a key to understanding their significance....