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A Chinese translation of Irene Eber’s Holocaust memoir ‘The Choice’ exposes unique cross-cultural linguistic quandaries
By RENEE GHERT-ZAND April 7, 2013, 6:32 pm
Local Zionist youth group outing in Halle, 1937. Eber’s older sister Lore is at far left in first row. (photo credit: courtesy)
Translating a Holocaust memoir into Chinese poses a real challenge when the Chinese character for “Hitler” is the same as the one for “Schindler.”
“I insisted they find two different characters to use,” said translator Vicky Wu of her correction of a change made by Xue Yuan, the Beijing publisher of the new Chinese translation of “The Choice: Poland, 1939-1945” by Irene Eber. “I explained that you can’t use the same name for the person who killed the Jews as for one who saved them.”
Wu, who lives in Tel Aviv and manages the Chinese office of an Israeli diamond-selling company, would have wanted in any case to make sure that the publisher did not make any such mistakes. But, with this particular book, the stakes were even higher: Its author, 83-year-old Holocaust survivor Eber, is a Hebrew University professor emeritus of Chinese history and philosophy and can, therefore, actually read and critique the Chinese edition.
Fittingly, “The Choice,” originally published in English by Schocken Books in 2004, is one of the first Holocaust memoirs to be translated into Chinese. As of this past January, it has joined a small number of works like “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Schindler’s List,” and “Escape from Auschwitz” on the shelves of China’s bookstores.
In “The Choice,” the German-born Eber recounts how her family, whose head of household was her Polish-born father, was forced out of Germany overnight in October 1938, just prior to Kristallnacht. When Poland finally let them in as refugees, they went to live with Eber’s father’s family in Mielec, in the southeastern part of the country. At the outbreak of WWII, the Germans massacred Jews in the town on Erev Rosh Hashanah 1939.
In March 1942, Mielec’s Jews were deported to the Lublin district, where Eber, then 12, and her family were forced to live in decrepit conditions with a local Jewish family in a small village. Eber’s family made their way back to Mielec, but they were again deported several times to various nearby ghettos. When they understood that the next deportation would be to Auschwitz, the family and some others went into hiding, where Eber witness a mother smothering her own child so it would not cry out.
Irene Eber with her older sister in Halle, Germany [more pics in original article]
When only her uncle, a member of the Judenrat, and her mother, a skilled typist, had permission to work in a nearby German labor camp, Eber made the decision — against her father’s wishes, but with her mother’s support — to escape. The fair-haired Eber dug her way under a fence, bought a train ticket to Mielec, and once there found a Polish family that would take her in. She hid in the family’s chicken coop for the next two years.
Eber writes skillfully and perceptively about her life and confused identity as a displaced person after the war — first as a Christian Polish girl living with the family that hid her, and then as a Jew again after being reunited with her mother and sister, who had survived by being on Schindler’s List. She also recounts with emotion and keen detail her pre-war middle class childhood in Halle, Germany and her adjustment to life as a refugee in Mielec.
Eber credits her ability to recall everything so vividly to her photographic memory. “I think in pictures, not abstract thoughts,” she told The Times of Israel from her home in Jerusalem. “I also think that my age at the time had something to do with it. Older people remembered less, and if you were too young, you didn’t remember anything. Those were my formative years,” she said of her lost adolescence.
The one part of her story about which she writes extremely little is her time in hiding. “There wasn’t a lot coming in during those years,” she said. Perhaps it is too painful to recall. When asked if she was ever let out of the chicken coop, she didn’t reply and instead joked, “One thing I can tell you is the habits of chickens, which could make a person turn vegetarian.”
Wu is a South China native who studied business in Switzerland, converted to Judaism in New York and made aliyah in 2004. For her, translating “The Choice” was a labor of love that she instigated by convincing Eber, whom she met at a Hebrew University symposium on 16th century Chinese translations of the Bible, that her memoir should be translated to Chinese. “It was the right thing to do, I had to try to make it happen,” said Wu, who also took on the task of finding a Chinese publisher.
Eber’s deliberate decision to tell her story in a non-chronological order posed a challenge to Wu, as did the Holocaust-specific history in the critical first chapters. “I didn’t know all the historical background,” she explained. “And I also didn’t know the emotions. “I needed to be brave, to let myself go where she went…the horror and the unbearable things.”
Translator Vicki Wu
When Wu ran into a word she did not understand, she asked Eber, who was closely involved in the project, for help. “There are four or five Chinese options for a single English word having to do with emotion. I needed to know which one to choose,” the translator said. “Professor was encouraging, she told me that in the end it is really beyond comprehension how those who went through it felt.”
“The Choice” was originally published with the help of former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief David K. Shipler, who came to know Eber through his father-in-law Harold Isaacs, an MIT professor and China expert who had encouraged Eber to make the 1980 return trip to Mielec that eventually led to “The Choice.” “Irene is one of my favorite people to sit down and have conversation with. She is eloquent and deep, principled and kind and enormously perceptive,” Shipler told The Times of Israel. “She has the capacity to be clear and generous in her thoughts about the Holocaust.”
In his Pulitzer-prize winning “Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land,” Shipler recounts a conversation he had with Eber about Arabs’ drawing parallels between Israelis and Nazis, and about the Palestinian’s appropriation of the Holocaust as a metaphor for their situation. “Irene Eber saw the parallel as infuriating, but she also understood it in another way, as a search for a Palestinian history,” Shipler wrote.
Similarly, Eber, who has focused her recent research on Jewish exiles in Shanghai during the war, recognizes comparisons the Chinese make between the Holocaust and the Nanjing Massacre, the six-week period beginning December 1937 when the Imperial Japanese Army murdered hundreds of thousands of unarmed Chinese civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers. However, she ultimately discounts them.
Chinese people’s interest in Jewish suffering could be a way to open the door to their own history
Ephraim Kaye, director of international seminars for educators at Yad Vashem, looked at the comparison a bit differently. Shocked to have seen that “Holocaust” appears in the name of the official memorial museum to the Nanjing Massacre, he said he realized that that Chinese people’s interest in Jewish suffering could be a way to open the door to their own history. Perhaps not coincidentally, interest in Jews and Judaism in China began in the 1990’s, the same period in which the Nanjing Massacre was finally acknowledged as being part of the national Chinese historical narrative.
Cover of "The Choice" by Irene Eber
More translated works are expected to make their way to market as a result of an increased interest in all things Jewish and Israeli among the Chinese. “The Chinese are very positive about Jews and Israel,” Wu said. “It is a golden era for China-Israel relations.”
Kaye also noted the warm relationship between the two countries. In recent years, Yad Vashem has held three Holocaust studies seminars for scholars from Mainland China, and one for an evangelical Christian group from Taiwan. Over 100 people have participated, with last October’s seminar alone having received 70 applications for only 29 places.
According to Kaye, 10 Chinese universities have institutes for Jewish studies, with some also offering Israel studies or Holocaust studies, or both. He believes the interest lies more in Judaism and Jews than with Israel. “I went to China in 2011 and people didn’t know anything about Israel, but if I said ‘Jew,’ people were very positive and associated the word with wealth, success and intelligence,” he recounted.
He’s been told by the Chinese scholars coming to Yad Vashem that they cannot successfully understand 20th century history and philosophy without also understanding Judaism and Jewish history. “They see it as all coming back to the Jews in some way.”
