BARNETT ZUMOFF
BARNETT ZUMOFF, also a native of Boro Park, Brooklyn, known to his friends as Barney in English and Berl in Yiddish, was, in his 95 years (1926-2021) a US Airforce flight surgeon and brigadier general; chief of endocrinology at Beth Israel Medical Center and professor of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; a leading figure in major secular Yiddish organizations in America. He was singularly dedicated to the survival of Yiddish and its capacity of its creative forces to appeal to the world at large. In that quest he became for many years the major translator of Yiddish literature into English, from the classics to contemporary authors, producing thirty volumes of translations. In 2012 he published a selection of Dovid Katz’s stories of old Jewish Lithuania, and followed up with this, his last work, completed and sent to Noir in his final days.
Barnett Zumoff
Marija Marcinkute
Marija Marcinkute studied English Language at Vilnius University. She set up an English language school in Vilnius shortly after the fall of the Communist regime. She translated business books from English into Lithuania and has worked as an interpreter in Lithuania, England and America. In 1996 she moved to Spain, where she lived for two years working as a translator and teacher before moving to England in 1998. In England she gained a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics. She works as a translator and interpreter.
Jura Avizienis
Jura Avizienis teaches writing at Boston University. She has been translating Lithuanian literature since 1990 when her first translations appeared in Violeta Kelertas's anthology of contemporary Lithuanian fiction, Come Into My Time (University of Illinois Press). Since then her translations have appeared in The Vilnius Review, The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature and Best European Fiction. She has translated two of Rasa Aškinytė's novels: The Easiest and The Man Who Needed Nothing.
Yisrael Cohen
Yisrael Elliot Cohen, B.A. Harvard College, Ph.D. Yale University, taught Russian literature and humanities at the University of Illinois. He settled in Israel in 1979, working as a professional translator from Russian into English and as an English-language editor. At Hebrew University he was co-editor of ‘Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe’ and worked on a bibliography project for the Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism. Currently at Yad Vashem, he is working on ‘Th e Untold Stories: Holocaust Murder Sites in the Soviet Union’. Dr. Cohen has translated several books. His nonacademic interests are his grandchildren and attempting to apply the teachings of the Biblical prophets to the contemporary social and political situation.