Accessing the Yiddish Word

Panel discussion with translators Tyler Kliem, Tamara Helfer, and Benjamin Lerman 

11:00 am | Seminar Room

Jewish Arts and Bookfest
Sunday, May 3, 2026

at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley,  CA

This multidisciplinary panel brings together literary translators Tamara Helfer and Benjamin Lerman with “visual translator” and graphic designer Tyler Kliem to discuss their recent works. Their discussion will shed light on the concerns of preserving, renewing, and extending the written and visual Yiddish word. Together, their transmission of Yiddish cultural ideas and visual symbols spans work from the late 19th century through to contemporary innovations in literature and typography. Tamara will discuss The Winding Road: My Childhood Years (Syracuse University Press), her translation of the fictionalized childhood memoir by Rokhl Feygenberg, one of the first professional Yiddish women writers. Benjamin will discuss Intimate Portraits, his translation of a collection of historic, mythic and folkloric short stories by Itzik Manger, one of the most celebrated Yiddish poets of the 20th century. Tyler will discuss the contemporary Yiddish printing and typographic projects of artists and designers, including his own, between letterpress art and digital font design.

About Tyler Kliem

Tyler Itsik Kliem is a print designer, poet-translator, and Yiddish scholar. His Yiddish typography work exists in the collections of the Jewish Museum, the Yiddish Book Center, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He has received support from Fulbright Germany for poetry and Yiddish study at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and is currently the Richard S. Herman Endowed Bibliography Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center.

Tyler is currently translating the modernist Yiddish poetry of Hasye Cooperman (1907–1991), an American poet and Yiddish academic, one of the first American women to write, and translate, her own Yiddish poetry. Cooperman’s sole collection of Yiddish poetry, Yagd (The Chase), published in ’20s New York, blends urbane modernism with the inward symbols, and colors, of desire. Dreamlike and strange, Cooperman’s writing has not appeared before in contemporary translation. Tyler intends to design the book-length bilingual collection.

About Tamara T. Helfer

Tamara T. Helfer is a former research astronomer, science educator, and program developer with broad interests in the intersection of history, genealogy, and storytelling. She was a 2023 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow.

About her translation: Rokhl Feygenberg became one of the youngest authors published in Yiddish when her autobiographical debut novel was released in 1905. Now translated for the first time into English, The Winding Road is Feygenberg’s fictionalized account of her childhood in an isolated Belarusian shtetl in the 1890s, which was framed by the deaths of her father when she was five and that of her mother when she was fourteen. Forced to provide and care for her family, the narrator finds escape through books and is inspired by them to invent a fantasy life for herself, transforming her everyday challenges into a imagined world of city life and romance. Readers are enmeshed in the daily rituals of Jewish life in the shtetl, following the narrator through her long days of labor and caring for family. Her story, at times funny, at times full of pathos, is a clear-eyed description of youthful imaginings with three-dimensional, flawed characters, and vivid descriptions of everyday shtetl life. The Winding Road presents an unvarnished portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish life and offers a unique and authentic voice to the shtetl story of a teenage girl. The Winding Road, a Yiddish Book Center translation, is published by Syracuse University Press.

About Benjamin Lerman

Benjamin Lerman started studying Yiddish as a seven-year-old using records borrowed from the Detroit Public Library in an unsuccessful attempt to crack his parents’ secret code. Further efforts would be much postponed. In the interim he became a physician and spent many midnights in the overly bright hallways of an Oakland emergency room, caring for the sick and the lonely, and training younger doctors to take his place someday. He also earned an MFA in creative writing, got married, and with his partner has raised two cats and two kids. One of those kids inspired him to spend seven years machining a working miniature steam locomotive. He has told a lot of stories, occasionally from a stage or podcast.

When he finally was able to resume the cryptology project he discovered that there were much more interesting reasons to learn Yiddish. He has recently been fascinated by Itzik Manger’s Noente Geshtaltn [Intimate Portraits], a collection of short stories in which Manger gave his imagination free rein to create lively, colorful depictions of some twenty figures from Yiddish cultural history. These go back as far as Gele, a 17th century Amsterdam girl whose own poem appeared in one of the books which she helped her father typeset, and continue right up to a sweatshop poet in 20th century America. His translation of this work is forthcoming from Ben Yehuda Press.