Vivian Felsen | |
---|---|
Nationality | Canadian |
Alma mater | University of Toronto |
Occupation | translator, artist |
Awards | Canadian Jewish Book Award, J. I. Segal Award |
Vivian Felsen is a Canadian translator from French and Yiddish into English, and a visual artist of Jewish origin. She is the recipient of the Canadian Jewish Book Award (2001) and J. I. Segal Award (2004, 2018) for her translations dealing with Canadian Jewish history and Holocaust memoirs.
Vivian Felsen comes from Toronto, [1] [2] her grandfather was the Jewish journalist Israel Medres. [2] She holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto, [1] where she studied French and Russian language and literature, [3] and a law degree from York University. [1]
Felsen works as a translator from French and Yiddish into English. [1] [2] [3] She began her career with translations of two books by Israel Medres, for which she received a Canadian Jewish Book Award (2001) and a J. I. Segal Award (2004). [2] She has since translated books on Canadian Jewish history, Holocaust memoirs as well as short stories written by Jewish women writers. [2] [3] The stories were published, among others, in The Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers, an anthology edited by Frieda Johles Forman, which was awarded with a Canadian Jewish Book Award (2014). [2] [3] Felsen's translation of Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung's Holocaust memoir titled The Veil of Tears was awarded a gold medal in the autobiography/memoir category of Independent Publisher Book Awards as well as a J. I. Segal Award (both 2018). [3] She was also nominated for the Governor General's Award for her rendition from French of the book J. I. Segal: a Montreal Yiddish Poet and His Milieu (2018). [4] [5] Her translations of poems by J. I. Segal later appeared in the journal Canadian Jewish Studies. [3]
Apart from translating, Felsen has also authored texts on Yiddish culture and literature. She has contributed to New Readings of Yiddish Montreal — Traduire le Montréal yiddish edited by Pierre Anctil, Norman Ravvin and Sherry Simon (2007), written an essay on Canadian Yiddish literature for Kanade, di Goldene Medine?: Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes (2018), [3] articles on Dora Shulner and Lili Berger for the Jewish Women's Archive website [1] and on Israel Medres for the second edition of Encyclopaedia Judaica . [6]
Felsen works as a visual artist, with a career spanning several decades. [3] [7] She taught drawing and painting at the Max the Mutt College of Animation, Art & Design, as well as through the Toronto Board of Education. [7] Felsen's works have been exhibited, among others, at Palacio das Artes in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and at the Gallery Arcturus. [7] She has also been among the jurors for the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Society of Canadian Artists. [7]
One of her sons studied at Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem and is now an Orthodox rabbi. [8]
Adler is a surname of German and Yiddish origin meaning eagle, and has a frequency in the United Kingdom of less than 0.004%, and of 0.008% in the United States. In Christian iconography, the eagle is the symbol of John the Evangelist, and as such a stylized eagle was commonly used as a house sign/totem in German speaking areas. From the tenement the term easily moved to its inhabitants, particularly to those having only one name. This phenomenon can be easily seen in German and Austrian censuses from the 16th and 17th centuries. The term might have been assigned also as a name descriptive of character or outward characteristics. It is also a common Jewish surname among the Ashkenazi community, where it may have derived from a reference to Psalm 103:5. Many notable people with the surname Adler are of Jewish origin, such as Alfred Adler. Adler is also sometimes used to denote the Jewish origins of fictional characters, such as in Mordechai Richler's Son of a Smaller Hero.
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