TALK | Women in Exile: What Yenta Mash Can Tell Us, with Ellen Cassedy

Yenta Mash (1922–2013) was an extraordinary writer whose own life story, backgrounded by exile and regime change, deeply informed her work. Her characters—sturdy, resilient people with a sly sense of humor—make their way from Eastern Europe shtetls to Siberian prison camps to the postwar Soviet Union and finally to the land of Israel. Ellen Cassedy, translator of the collection On the Landing: Stories by Yenta Mash, talks about the author’s life and luminous short stories and about the joys and challenges of translation. Ellen Cassedy completed her translation of On the Landing as a Yiddish Book Center translation fellow in 2017. She is also the co-translator, with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, of Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel, which won the 2012 Translation Prize awarded by the Yiddish Book Center and the 2018 Modern Language Association Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. Ellen is the author of the memoir We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust, which won several nat