Death in Venice: German in Hebrew letters and Yiddish translation

Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice — a bilingual German–Yiddish reading workbook This distinctive A4 workbook presents Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig in a format designed to help readers acquire practical fluency in reading German and Yiddish in the Hebrew script. On the right-hand page, Mann’s German original appears in Hebrew letters, following the historical German-in-Hebrew tradition associated with Moses Mendelssohn and later Jewish publishing. The corresponding Latin-script German is placed interlineally above the Hebrew-script text as a reading aid. On the facing left-hand page appears M. Holtsblat’s 1929 Yiddish translation, together with right-to-left YIVO romanization placed directly above the corresponding Yiddish words. The two texts are synchronized paragraph by paragraph and section by section, making it possible to move continuously between Mann’s German and Holtsblat’s Yiddish while comparing vocabulary, syntax, phrasing, and literary style. The volume is intended especially for: specialists and students of German; German-speaking readers interested in Jewish languages and print culture; students of Yiddish; linguists, translators, and scholars of comparative literature; readers who wish to learn to read the Hebrew alphabet through a familiar German literary text. The workbook is based on the idea that the structural and lexical closeness of German and Yiddish can provide German-speakers with an unusually accessible route into reading Yiddish. By first learning to recognize familiar German words in Hebrew script, readers can gradually develop the confidence needed to approach Yiddish books in the original. The volume includes: Thomas Mann’s German original in Hebrew letters; Latin-script German as interlinear guidance; M. Holtsblat’s Yiddish translation in Hebrew script; YIVO romanization of the Yiddish; word-level interlinear alignment; paragraph-by-paragraph and section-by-section correspondence; an introductory explanation of the book’s pedagogical concept. A bilingual and biscriptal workbook for learning to read German and Yiddish in Hebrew script. Conceived and compiled by T.D.I. Kamusella