Cette étude vise à démontrer les différents aspects de la civilisation juive d’Europe de l’Est que conteste, dans ses écrits, l’auteur yiddishophone Isaac Bashevis Singer. Dans ses nouvelles, il met en scène des personnages féminins déchirés entre le monde du shtetl et la modernité convoitée. Ce mémoire explore cinq nouvelles, Yentl, l’étudiant de Yeshiva, Taibele et son démon, Zeitl et Rickel, Yanda et La sorcière, qui problématisent toutes la représentation féminine. À la lumière des écrits théoriques de Vincent Jouve et de Philippe Hamon, ce mémoire analyse thématiquement les diverses composantes de l’identité et de l’univers féminin afin de démontrer les éléments contredits par Singer.

This dissertation explores the history of the translation of world literature into Yiddish through a series of interconnected case studies, stretching from the “founding” decade of modern Yiddish literature through its interwar acme. It features diachronic studies of single translator-authors (Sh. Y. Abramovitsh; Der Nister; Isaac Bashevis Singer) which consider the relationship between translations and original writing; synchronic views of transformative moments in Yiddish literary (translational) history across its multiple centers (1903; 1910; New York, Warsaw, Moscow); and “distant” readings of periodicals and anthologies with an eye to their particular explicit and implicit translation theories and practices as well as to the role of editors and publishers (Sholem Aleichem; Avrom Reyzen) in shaping both real and imagined literary markets. Throughout, it mobilizes the chronically-neglected genre of homegrown Yiddish literary criticism and theory (I.L. Peretz, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Moyshe Litvakov) in the hopes of understanding the shifting stakes and meanings of translation on the terms of translators, authors, critics, and readers themselves. By attending to the ways in which translations functioned as both sources of livelihood and engines of literary growth, this dissertation examines the desired and intermittently realized modernization and “normalization” of Yiddish literature on the world stage.