Prizewinner 2024
Jon Cho-Polizzi has been chosen to receive the 2024 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize by a three-person jury for his translation of Max Czollek's De-Integrate: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century, published by Restless Books in 2023. The honor will be presented to him at an award ceremony at the Goethe-lnstitut New York on October 1, 2024.
Established in 1966 and newly funded by the Friends of the Goethe New York, the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translatro's Prize honors an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the USA/Canada the previous year.
Jury Statement: The jury for the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize takes great pleasure in awarding the 2024 prize to Jon Cho-Polizzi for his translation of Max Czollek's De-Integrate, published by Restless Books. We congratulate Jon Cho-Polizzi, whose marvelously confident rendering introduces English-speaking readers to a fresh and powerful voice with a vital message. Max Czollek's reflections on Germany's past, present, and potential future, as the country reckons with rising antisemitism, xenophobia, and racism, urges minoritized communities in Germany not to buy into the promise of assimilation as defined by the dominant culture-all too eager to shed its past-and to stop participating in a kitsch-filled memory culture, but instead to adopt a stance of resistance and embrace "otherness" while striving to forge a truly pluralistic society; hence the title De-Integrate.
Cho-Polizzi's crackling, punchy language brilliantly takes up the challenge of the book's many shifts in register (theoretical, academic, critical, colloquial), tone (sardonic and humorous to reflective and personal), and form (poetry, rap lyrics, newspaper/journal articles, speeches, statements). His buoyant prose, which manages to read both effortlessly and invitingly, captures the flavor of the original as it conveys issues of urgent current interest. His sparkling presentation extends even to the translator footnotes. Max Czollek's book, in Jon Cho-Polizzi's resplendent translation, is sure to linger in readers' minds for a long time to come.
Jon Cho-Polizzi is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His literary translations highlight the polyphony of contemporary German-language literature.
