In Paper Bridges the poet, translator, and Yiddish scholar Kathryn Hellerstein has selected poems from the six books of Yiddish poetry Kadya Molodowsky (1894–1975) published between 1924 and 1974. In her introduction Hellerstein mentions that, according to Jewish legend, when the messiah comes, the Jews will cross into paradise over a paper bridge (p. 32). Molodowsky's use of this folk motif as a theme in her poetry exemplifies its double character, which embraces both social realism and messianic utopianism. The poems are presented in their original Yiddish version and in precise, often evocative, translations. Endnotes elucidate ambiguous meanings of Yiddish words. This allows the reader to partake in some of the choices Hellerstein faced as translator.

In her note on the translation Hellerstein describes some of the difficulties in translating Yiddish literature into English. The primary obstacle, she writes, is a basic incompatibility between Yiddish, which is rooted deeply in Jewish tradition, and English, with its strong Romance influence, embedded in Christian tradition. The impossibility of conveying the multifaceted Jewish associations in the vocabulary that stems from the Hebrew–Aramaic component of Yiddish is perhaps the strongest argument for the necessity of bilingual editions of Yiddish poetry. Words such as agune (‘abandoned wife’) or tume (‘ritually unclean’) in ‘Froyen-lider’ (‘Women Poems’) from Molodowsky's first collection, Kheshvndike nekht (‘Nights of Heshvan’, 1927), cannot merely be left in their English translation. The translation instead becomes a gateway to the original with the translator as guide, interpreter, and, to a large extent, custodian of a Yiddish poetic language which is mostly obscure and hidden in today's American literary landscape.

In his introduction to a 1991 selection of poems by Abraham Sutzkever, Benjamin Harshav, another excellent translator of Yiddish poetry, remarks: ‘We felt that in this almost lost, hardly accessible language of literary Yiddish (unlike the lower-class jargon that many Americans still remember), we should convey the original meaning as closely as possible.’

The question remains, of course, as to what the original meaning actually was. Bilingual editions give the reader the opportunity to compare the translations with the original. Even if the reader has no knowledge of Yiddish, he or she must still confront the otherness of the Hebrew alphabet.