Beatrice Coralnik Papo didn’t know her father very well when he was alive. But she has spent the last 15 years getting to know him, well after his death.
Papo, a 91-year-old San Jose resident, recently published “Across the Great Divide,” a two-volume collection of essays written by her father, Abraham Coralnik. She has translated the entire collection from its original Yiddish.
Editing her father’s work became even more of a family affair when Papo’s grandson, Daniel Schifrin of Berkeley, took on the task of editing the collection.
Papo and Schifrin will be speaking about their collaboration 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, at Congregation Beth David, 19700 Prospect Road, Saratoga, where Papo is a member.
Coralnik was well-known in Jewish literary circles in the period between the first and second world wars. His essays appeared in Der Tog, the Yiddish daily newspaper, and he also served for a time as the editor of Die Welt, the newspaper begun by the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl.
He wrote on a wide array of subjects: Yiddish language and culture, Zionism, American Jewish politics, European philosophy and literature.
“He challenged established views and clichés of American Jewish life and was regarded as a gadfly by some, and as a stimulating and inspiring leader in cultural life by others,” said Papo. “In his last year he was a primary organizer of the anti-Nazi boycott.”
Papo’s parents separated when she was 3, and then her father went off to the United States. He traveled back to Europe frequently, but father and daughter had only short visits.
“By the time I came to the United States we had only six months to get to know each other before he was carried off by a heart attack,” said Papo.
While she wasn’t quite aware of her father’s importance as a child, later on, she’d get used to the dry cleaner or butcher asking her, “Are you related to Dr. Coralnik?”
But it was only when she was in her 70s that she felt compelled to do something with his body of work.
“The eight volumes of my father’s selected essays were on my shelf for many years before I started reading them,” she said. “But once I started, I became so involved in them that I recognized that this was my children’s and, by then, grandchildren’s spiritual heritage, and that it behooved me to pass it on to them. And the only way I could do that was to translate them.”
By this time, Schifrin was a student at UCLA, and he was developing an interest in writing and journalism.
“She would send me an essay and we’d talk about it,” he said. “Gradually, I started asking more questions about the work and translation.”
After he graduated, Schifrin moved to New York, where he became a columnist for the New York Jewish Week, writing mainly about Jewish literature and popular ideas; exactly what his great-grandfather had done.
“That’s when I became more curious about him and his essays, and then I decided to take a more active role,” he said.
Papo and Schifrin agreed that Coralnik’s essays should be made available for others, and to publish them.
For Schifrin, who now serves as the director of literary programs for the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, it was an interesting assignment, since he served as the primary editor, but does not speak Yiddish.
The pair used the translation help of two graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, who helped with style and putting it into the context of how a columnist for a Yiddish newspaper might write.
When asked to expound on one essay that was representative of his great-grandfather’s work, Schifrin chose one called “Pouring Salt on Open Wounds,” which “lambastes Jews who are not self-critical, who are complacent about themselves as Jews in the world, and who are willing to accept easy answers to difficult questions.”
Schifrin continued: “Coralnik had two distinct, clashing sides to him, both of which are key to understanding his personality and influence. The first side, the firebrand, comes out in this essay. Here he lets loose his firm convictions about the direction of Jewish life. The second side, what I might call the cogitator, is the much more reflective side. Coralnik uses the essay as his form because, as its etymology tells us, it is an attempt to grapple with something, not a firm, ideological position paper.”
The pair never approached a publishing house, since there are several hundred essays and the collection runs more than 1,000 pages. Instead, they chose to go the “publish on demand” route. The book is available on www.amazon.com.
Schifrin, 37, said the opportunity to work with his grandmother on this project has been “amazing.”
“Most grandchildren don’t have this opportunity,” he said, adding that over the years, he has gone from seeing his grandmother as the woman who took him for walks and for ice cream, to “this ferocious intellectual with all this background.”
“Across the Great Divide: The Selected Essays of Abraham Coralnik” translated by Beatrice Coralnik Papo and edited by Daniel Schifrin (1035 pages, iuniverse.com, $61.90).