Miriam Hoffman

Miriam (Schmulewitz) Hoffman (born 1936), has been a lecturer of Yiddish language at Columbia University since 1993.

Hoffman was born in Łódź, Poland to a Yiddish-speaking family.^[1] While she was a child, her father was sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia, accompanied by Hoffman and her mother.^[1] After a difficult passage through several other countries, the family arrived in the US during 1949.^[1] In 1957 finished the Jewish Teacher's Seminary with a BA in pedagogy. In the 1970s taught Yiddish at the University of Tel-Aviv, Israel. Received a B.A. from the University of Miami, cum laude in 1981. An M.A. from Columbia University in 1983. From 1991-1994 taught Yiddish and Yiddish Dramatic Arts at Oxford University Summer Program.

For the last 20 years, columnist and feature writer for the Jewish Forward, where she has published over two thousand articles. Also edited a monthly literary supplement for the Jewish Forward. In 1992 she won the Israeli equivalent of a Tony Award for her English-to-Yiddish translation of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys.^[1]

Playwright

She is a playwright, with ten Yiddish plays to her name, produced and performed both at the N. Y. Shakespeare Festival and the Joseph Papp Theater, off-Broadway at the Astor Theater, the John Houseman Theater, the 92nd St. Y, with productions in major American and European cities, among them: Amsterdam, Zurich, Munich, Dresden, Regensburg and Warsaw, Poland. Original plays staged at The Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in New York, the Jewish Repertory Theater-Playhouse 91, Center for Jewish History, the Sadye Bronfman Theater in Montreal, Canada, Akzent Theater in Vienna, Austria and the Yiddishpiel Theater in Tel-Aviv, Israel. 1992 Israeli equivalent of the Tony Award for translation into Yiddish of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys.

Author

The Congress for Jewish Culture published a series of Hoffman's Yiddish children's books. Fellowship award from the Holocaust memorial Foundation, literary awards from the National Foundation for Jewish culture and the New School for Social Research. Published in "Di Goldene Keyt," literary magazine in Israel - a scholarly work on - "Łódź - Yiddish dialect." Winner of the Dora Teitelbaum Foundation for a literary work, published "Memory and Memorial," in the Yivo Bleter Publication. Entry on the History of the Yiddish Theater in the Encyclopedia Americana (pp. 678–679), published the History of the Joseph Papp Yiddish Theater in the "Oxforder Yiddish," volume two, "Women in the novels of A. M. Fuks," "Oxforder Yiddish," volume three.

Lecturer

Hoffman has lectured all over the world, topics include: "Yiddish language and Folklore, Yiddish Theater and Film", "The unpublished diary of a Jewish Soldier in the First World War," "Hebrew vs Yiddish," Chaim Grade's "Deciphering a Seminal Masterpiece," "Life in a D.P. Camp in Germany (displaced persons - saving remnants of the Holocaust)" (1946–1949), also a collection of Songs in four languages, (Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and Polish) which was written down in the D.P. Camp in Ulm, Germany by the then ten-year-old Miriam, and brought to America in 1950, now at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. She is fluent in Yiddish and Hebrew, and has a speaking knowledge of Russian, Polish and some German.

Footnotes

↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "The Vilnius Yiddish Institute Newsletter, No. 4, February, 2003". Vilnius Yiddish Institute. Retrieved 2011-01-12.

References