Vivian Felsen is an award-winning translator of French and Yiddish into English, with a background in modern history, modern languages, and law. Her published translations include books on Canadian Jewish history, Holocaust memoirs, and short stories, mostly by Yiddish women writers. Her translations from Yiddish include Montreal of Yesterday: Jewish Life in Montreal, 1900–1920, by Israel Medres, which received a Canadian Jewish Book Award in 2001, and Between the Wars: Canadian Jews in Transition, also by Medres, for which she won a prestigious J. I. Segal Award in 2004, as well as several Holocaust memoirs, beginning with the historically significant Memoirs of the Lodz Ghetto by Yankl Nirenberg (2003). Her translation of The Vale of Tears by Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung (2016) received a Gold Medal in the autobiography/memoir category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards, as well as a J.I. Segal award for translation. Her translations of Yiddish short stories have been published in a variety of publications, as well as in the award-winning The Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers (2013). Felsen’s translations from French include The Veiled Sun: From Auschwitz to New Beginnings (2015) by Paul Schaffer, as well as J. I. Segal (1896–1954): A Montreal Yiddish Poet and His Milieu by Pierre Anctil. Her essays on Yiddish translation appeared in New Readings of Yiddish Montreal (2007), Kanade, di Goldene Medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture (2018), and Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes (2019).
