I began the second, letterpress-printed half of my senior thesis project with an open mind and without a set plan. Following my initial research into the materiality of tkhines (early modern Jewish women’s prayers, as described in the previous blog post), I sat down with a laser-printed version of a 1992 translation of Sarah Bas Tovim’s original text and quite literally cut pieces of it away until I was left with what I saw as the core of the prayer: one woman’s plea for a spiritual connection that fully acknowledged and celebrated the role of her gender in her religious life. Sarah’s text resonated strongly with me, and I made first-person additions to the prayer that highlighted similarities between her life and my own.
A reader holding Nora Cornell’s version of Shloshe She’arim
The design process was similarly exploratory and circuitous. With three distinct “voices” to represent (the original text in Yiddish, the original text in English, and my own English-language additions), I set out to design a typographic system that clearly differentiated each voice in the text and harkened back to the complex hierarchies of language and typography present in the historical documents. I printed the Yiddish in black from a narrow 24- and 30-point Hebrew-alphabet metal typeface, with occasional phrases in a warm brown color from a wider 8-pica wood type for emphasis and visual interest. Similarly, I used an 18-point condensed typeface for the English, in black for the original and red for my additions, with a corresponding 5-pica square wood type in the same warm brown. Throughout the pamphlet (which reads right to left, like a standard Yiddish book), the Yiddish text is on the right page and the corresponding English text is on the left. As a beginner Yiddish speaker myself, I knew that my audience would be instinctively drawn to the English text, and so I wanted to prioritize the Yiddish by giving it more visual weight.
The mix of typefaces and languages recalls the cobbled-together feel of earlier tkhines, as does the flimsy, handheld format, but my design choices and printing processes are much more connected to contemporary book arts traditions. For this reason, I took to calling the project an “artist’s pamphlet,” as it lives in the spaces between accessible and elite, between unique and mass-produced, and between old and new.
I printed the book over the course of three months in Wellesley College’s Book Arts Lab. The project quickly became one of meditative repetition: I was creating 100 copies of a three-color book, where each copy was made from three separate sheets of paper. This meant that (at a conservative estimate and with some fuzzy math) I completed 1800 cranks of the Vandercook SP-15 press throughout this project. This is, auspiciously, 100 times chai, the Jewish word for life, which is numerically represented by the lucky number 18. With each piece of type I set, with each crank of the letterpress, and with each fold and stitch I made in the final pages, I felt myself grow closer and closer to the women who first wrote, printed, and read from these documents more than 150 years ago.
Shloshe She’arim in Cornell’s thesis installation
To me, that is the power (or one of the powers) of book arts: the capacity to tap into — or even create — powerful connections across time and space through the use of the written word and the tangible page. Even after months of research on Sarah Bas Tovim and her tkhines, nothing made the text come to life more than watching it take physical shape in front of me, piece by tiny piece. And nothing could more effectively convey the significance of my project than inviting my community to take part in it themselves. To celebrate the completion of my thesis, I invited friends, professors, and the entire Wellesley community to a letterpress open house. I shared my research findings and invited each guest to print their own copy of a special letterpress keepsake, where they connected themselves (knowingly or not) to the same long line of people involved in the care and preservation of women’s prayer and materiality.
I am still engaged in the process of distributing my pamphlets. In addition to the copies acquired by friends, family, and mentors, my version of Shloshe She’arim is held by Wellesley College, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, as well as by artists, Yiddishists, and scholars across the country, with more still to be distributed. As this project takes on a life of its own, I hope that it brings these previously-marginalized people, prayers, and documents to the forefront of contemporary art and scholarship. Tkhines are a powerful example of how book arts and critical bibliography shouldn’t just include women as individuals but can be reshaped around them and their work.
Nora Cornell is a recent graduate of Wellesley College, where she created the Book Studies major. Her poems can be seen in The Blue Nib, Furrow Magazine, and Prairie Home Magazine, and her artist books are held by Wellesley College, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Yiddish Book Center, and elsewhere.
