The second Yiddish Harry Potter book arrives, and J.K. Rowling is she who must not be named
A ‘monumental achievement’ for Yiddish literature is painful for many given Rowling’s attacks on trans people
The cover for Harry Potter un di kamer fun soydes, translated by Arun Schaechter Viswanath. Illustration by Jonny Duddle
By PJ Grisar August 14, 2024
Working on The Chamber of Secrets, the second volume of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, posed some new challenges for its Yiddish translator.
“The second book she already really starts to expand the Potterverse and starts introducing a lot of new characters and more terminology than in the first book,” said Arun Schaechter Viswanath, whose Harry Potter un di kamer fun soydes is out now for preorders.
For Viswanath, a native Yiddish speaker, this meant inventing words and figuring out exactly how to render a pivotal anagram, “I am Lord Voldemort,” in Yiddish. To do so he furnished a new middle name for he-who-must-not-be-named — “Aradolv,” reminiscent of a certain dictator.
“That was the closest that I could get to a name that sounds really evil to Jews post-Holocaust,” Viswanath, whose first book translation was of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, said in a phone interview.
But there was another hurdle since Viswanath’s Harry Potter un der filosofisher shteyn was released in 2020, selling out in less than 48 hours: J.K. Rowling, who created the series. In recent years, many have labelled Rowling a TERF, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, for posting prolifically on social media about trans people and writing lengthy essays about her views on gender and biological sex. (She denies being transphobic.)
Rowling lambastes gender-inclusive language, at times insists on referring to trans people by the wrong pronouns, frames trans women as a threat to cisgender women and is militantly opposed to gender affirming care for young people, calling it “a new kind of conversion therapy.” In April, via her presence on X, formerly Twitter, she suggested that Nazis didn’t burn research on trans healthcare (they did, targeting the library of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s clinic).
Rowling, who wrote a novel about a murdered author accused of transphobia and made a podcast series dedicated to portraying herself as a misunderstood victim, has responded to her critics by threatening them with defamation suits. During the 2024 Olympics, Rowling accused Algerian boxer Imane Khelif of being a man (Khelif is a cisgender woman); now the author is named in a cyberbullying lawsuit alongside Elon Musk.
Rowling’s recent reputation has many in the secular Yiddish world, a largely progressive and disproportionately queer and trans group, questioning if her work deserves to be translated, and giving serious thought to the harm continuing to work on the series may cause.
“As a trans person, I’m sick of talking about J.K. Rowling,” Misha Holleb, author of The A–Z of Gender and Sexuality, said in an email. “As a Yiddishist, I’m glad we are getting more work translated into Yiddish; it indicates an interest in the language that I can only welcome. I just wish we had higher standards for what was worthy of translation.”
Lili Rosen, an ex-Hasidic Jew, Yiddishist and actor, says she can understand to an extent why some people justify reading the books based on nostalgia. (She said she thinks the books are derivative and pedestrian.) But she believes there is a difference between engaging with classic works of literature whose authors may be problematic, studied academically and given context, and Harry Potter, whose writer is still alive and leading “active, incredibly harmful campaigns” against the trans community.
“The fact of the matter is that the mere mention of her name, which you’ll notice I don’t use, is deeply, deeply triggering to most, if not all, trans people,” Rosen said. “She has become the face of gender criticism. And by engaging with it, you’re contributing to that, whether you intend to or not.”
Rosen, who is trans, said that she would apply a similar test for whether to engage with Rowling as she did to Jews driving German cars, once a taboo in her community.
“As long as there are survivors for whom the Mercedes symbol will evoke nightmares, just don’t,” Rosen said.
Samantha Zerin, a musicologist known in Yiddish circles as Shuli Elisheva, discovered Harry Potter as an adult, finding the books on the shelf of her rented apartment in Israel. She was hooked, and wrote a Purim song imagining the holiday at Hogwarts. She said that Rowling’s attacks on trans people felt “personal,” becoming widely visible shortly after she came out as a trans woman in 2019, but defends the choice to translate her stories into Yiddish.
In a post to a Jewish Facebook group in 2020, Elisheva recalled the Talmudic story of the Oven of Achnai, in which God celebrates his children triumphing over Him in their study of Torah and related it to Rowling’s authorship.
“G-d wrote the Torah. And then G-d gave the Torah to Moses on Sinai. In doing so, G-d relinquished authority over the text, literally passing the text into human hands,” Elisheva wrote.
“Just as the Torah is no longer in Heaven, Harry Potter is no longer in the hands of J.K. Rowling.”
For Elisheva, who is friends with Viswanath and called him an “ally,” the first Yiddish Harry Potter was a “monumental achievement and a rarity in Yiddish literature.” She led a book group on it, over Zoom, during the pandemic.
“Yiddish Harry Potter, for me, was was part of the social bringing together in the pandemic,” Elisheva said in a phone call.
Like Viswanath, Elisheva believes that Harry Potter can fill a void in Yiddish literature for children. There are Hasidic books and stories from Sholem Aleichem, but they say none have the popular appeal of Harry Potter nor the depth and world building. They both believe that the text is a boon to Yiddish, but also a great tool for teaching.
Viswanath said that he had received “random unfriendly tweets or Facebook comments” about continuing to translate Rowling, or requesting he translate a different book. But he believes the work is canonical and familiar and can be a “stepping stone” for people to learn Yiddish.
“It’s not just that it has emotional resonances, there’s a real advantage to people knowing what the sentences are in English,” Viswanath said.
Viswanath’s translation has been heralded by the Yiddish world for its use of idiom and traditional Yiddish dialects — Hagrid speaks like a Galicianer and McGonagall like a Litvak. In a nod to the arguably antisemitic goblins, he has them use a form of Yiddish, sprinkled with Hebrew, that Jews would sometimes use to keep gentiles from understanding them.
But there is concern that in an anti-trans political climate that even in translation these books can prop up Rowling’s voice.
“If she were as vocally antisemitic as she is transphobic, would her work still be translated into Yiddish?” Rosen asked. “I think the answer is very clearly, ‘No,’ which means that trans people are just not as important to you.”
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