I haven't checked the weather, but I know it is a perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl. Thanks for joining me here at Nice Jewish books
In a nice Jewish books first, I won't be speaking with the author of the book from the Jewish provinces by Fradl Shtock, but rather her translators, Jordan Finkin and Alison Schachter. So welcome, Jordan and Alison.
Hi, thanks so much for having us.
Yeah, thank you. This is wonderful.
So first, would you please tell me about Fradl Shtok? .
Sure, we can. I'll start and say a little bit about her. She was a Yiddish writer, who was born at the edges of the Austro Hungarian empire, the border with Russia and emigrated to the United States in 1907, maybe at the age of 17, maybe at the age of 19. The dates of her birth are a little bit uncertain. And when she came to the US, she began writing poetry to quite a bit of a claim, especially for a woman writer at the time. And then she pivoted to publishing a large volume of collected short stories, and which received some mixed reviews. And then she largely disappeared from the public literary Yiddish literary scene. And one of the things I think that's so interesting about her and then I'll let Jordan talk a little bit more about her as well, is that the lore about her life was that she died sometime in the 1930s that she was devastated at the reviews for her book. And she died in a sanitarium or institution for mentally ill. But in fact, this turns out to be absolutely not true. And she certainly lived for certain to the 1960s. And we surmise, probably died in 1980 at Rockland state psychiatric institute. But Jordan, do you want to add anything?
Her biography is interesting in the sense that it little moments pop up. But there's no detailed timeline of of her life. But as a poet, I mean, that's that's where Yiddish literary historians know her best, or people who studied literary history, know her best as a poet, because that's what everyone focused on. And she one of the interesting quirks is that she is very commonly credited as being the earliest writer of sonnets in Yiddish poetry, which is also not true. One of the earliest quality writers of sonnets in Yiddish, but there were several sonneteers before her so she lot as she walks astride these these odd moments of people trying to claim her or disclaim her for certain things that make her doubly compelling, this strange biography and these remarkable stories that she wrote.
Alright, thanks. I hadn't known about her history as a poet. But that was one of the things that struck me when I was reading them is that every once in a while, a few sentences would, would seem very poetic, and I'd actually marked one, she wrote, "why did she always feel the need to look at him? She didn't know, she felt like she could just grab those eyes, like two cups of wine and drink them down. And then then nothing, of course." And it was just that image. And those words were just so evocative to me.
I mean, I think that one of the interesting things about the way that her prose can sometimes read as poetic is also that she was such a deeply modernist writer. And part of that modernism was the making strange of language and taking language out of its everyday context, or describing the everyday in ways that we're in can be incredibly a strange thing. And she does that. I mean, I think that those lines are a great example of how expertly she does achieve that effect in her writing, heightening moments, sometimes even making them comment or ironic through that kind of poetic technique.
And the descriptions can sometimes Yeah, they will sometimes not jar you, but they will pull you up short, right, because you're not expecting that particular metaphor, that at one point in one of the stories, she says something to the effect of his words sounded like fish jelly slipping down as you swallow it or something. And it's a startling, metaphorical moments that she uses.
Yeah, sh e that inspired kind of a gag reflex.
I think it's supposed to
you sort of alluded to this, but her story struck me as kind of impressionistic, like they were just snapshots of particular moments and not, not a lot happened in them, there wasn't really too much of a plot in the stories.
That's a common reaction I've encountered, I think very often because the aesthetics now for short stories are not, our expectations of short story are not the same, and hers very much are vignettes, because she was very invested in understanding the fine tunings of the inner world of the mind of her protagonist. And that's not written over large time arcs and lots of activity, but really about the, as I say, Fine tuning of reactions to incidents and feelings and the associations that they they evoke internally, and how that maps out on to the external world that her protagonists are, are trying to navigate.
I would I would also add to that one of the interesting features that's so exciting about her work is the way that she's focusing on women's experiences. And not necessarily I mean, there are women trapped in domestic spaces. But in for many of these young women, characters, their frustration that nothing ever gets to happen in their lives, their brother's travel, but they're kind of paralyzed or stuck in a world that doesn't allow them to have things happen, that things can only happen through their imagination or their desires. And so I think that that that genre of vignette or of the sort of interior world also captures something about the ways that young women experience their lives at a particular moment in time.
I actually have a follow up to that. But first, I wanted to ask, are the stories published in your book in the order that they were written?
No,
No? okay. Because I just noticed that in the first part of the book, that there seem to be a lot of the theme of sexual awakening that, you know, a first feeling of maybe not love or lust or attraction, but it also seemed connected with someone leaving that the man rides away on a horse or a train. So can you talk about that more,
We divided the collection, in some ways, according to place. So we have, you know, the stories that are set in the Austro Hungarian empire in the sort of shtetl area, and then the stories that are set in New York, and the stories that are set in Eastern Europe, really focus on that on young women's frustrated desires. And I think that this is, it's interesting that she's focusing on kind of erotic coming of age, and I love how you put it, it's almost like just the first awakening to even the idea of desire, right, like the moment when you realize it, as opposed to something more developed. But I think that that experience is largely tracked geographically so that the stories that are set in New York, really describe more of the immigrant experience. And that not not entirely first cut, or the cut, I think it'd be translated as is is an example of a story that captures some of that. But I can see why it might seem like the stories are written first, because they, they're younger characters, for sure.
So we did not. Well, we translated all of the stories, but we didn't publish all of the stories, we decided the division between the Eastern European stories and the New York stories basically are made for not only good geographical division, but stylistic as well, along the lines of you mentioned, and some of the American stories, the immigrant experience is a little more, I don't want to say cookie cutter, but they're more much more well known to an English speaking audience. And so it really was the they're very good stories. But the most compelling stories, I think, in the collection are definitely the ones that she developed in that Eastern European millieu.
One temporal a distinction, though, to make is that the last story in the collection, the Fur Merchant, was actually a story that she published in the Forwards, which was, you know, the largest circulating Yiddish paper after the Yiddish literary world declared her dead long before they then re acknowledged her. But in the 40s she sent her stories to Abe Kahan. And one of the remarkable things about that story is that there you can see her development as a writer that there's a sophistication and maturation of her writing style. That suggests to us that she must have continued writing long after she stopped publishing in this collection and 1919. We know she also wrote a novel in English that was pretty poorly reviewed, but in the 20s, and a play as well, but It does tell us that she was continually develop as a writer and an artist through the 40s.
And that story takes that last story, the Fur Merchant takes place in Canada. I think it's a fantastic story that really just it's incredibly evocative. But again, it's now a new environment for her and a new kind of style that she's she clearly testing out.
Can you walk us through this story?
Do you want to do Jordan?
Sure, yeah. Um, it's, it's sort of a back and forth. It's a Jewish fur merchant, fur salesmen, something along those lines, who is his great love is bilking people out of money. But he's trying to buy pelts off of a French Canadian fur trapper. And so you have the point of view of the first merchant trying to get the best deal he can. And flashbacks in the mind of the first merchant about the hardship that he endured to trap these animals in the first place. So there's, you know, subtextual there's a lot of animalistic, almost quasi erotic imagery, as well as violence as well as a almost anti capitalist diatribe in how she critiques the for merchants way of business.
Yeah, on the first try, it's the fur trapper, right, who we learned about the hunt and his relationship to the hunt. But he loves these furs like he really values them. And the fur Merchant is trying to as part of the negotiation undervalue them, and the violence of the hunt comes up in the sort of fur trappers memory. But then there's the violence of the fur merchant towards his own family, and the way that he sort of breaks his child's toy and acts out in anger towards his wife. It's a very tense, intense story. That's pretty remarkable.
I want to switch gears a little bit. There was some low key humor in many of the stories, but the one that made me really laugh out loud was Cholera, where a family had gotten sick after eating some bad fish. But the town was convinced that they had cholera and not food poisoning. And even the doctor was insisting that it wasn't cholera, they painted the gate to show that there was a plague there, and, and then they were upset that the family didn't die in a timely manner. Cholera should have killed them off. So it was just so funny and absurd.
Yeah, really, she's, it's funny, because there's like these two set pieces. There's the doctor, the doctor, you know, the German speaking figure of a metropolitan center who has come to offer his, you know, official pronouncement. And the, his sort of Germanus kind of elitism is being mocked. And then there's the ignorance of the folks in the shuttle who are obsessed with cholera. And she's like, everything in the everybody in that story is definitely grounds for making fun of the exaggerated importance of the metropolitan center, and also the kind of ridiculous closed mindedness of the people in the town. And I think she's really attuned to some fabulous details in the story about the way they move aside, and what happens to the doctor. And all of that is just really brilliantly done.
And you get a sense, I mean, not often in Me, you, you get a sense that in a lot of the Eastern European stories, that they're close to home, only a couple of them does, she mentioned explicitly, that they're the same town that she was born in. So they're not autobiographical, in in that sense, but you can tell in a story like this, that the details are too crisp, and the humor is too cutting for it not to have been inspired, at least by some sort of personal experience.
So it sounded like you're both very engaged with the last story, but was wondering if you had another favorite story in the collection.
You know, it's funny, we've in different moments, where we've had to suggest a story to read we I'd say we've oscilated among all the stories, I mean, I love the one where is it called? almonds, almonds, and that's this woman who's working at her family's inn or Tavern and she's eating basically stealing money from the till to buy these almonds and she's and then she's, her hairdresser is arrives and it's reflect cutting her hair and I have this Like playful exchange about fashion and beauty and, and she's just this like, surprising character both as you know someone who's, like, read so much of depictions of, you know, Eastern European Jewry, it's it's such a different and lively figure, this rebellious daughter who's absorbed in her own pleasures and beauty and how that unfolds in the course of the story with her taking off and her flirtations. I don't know, I just think it's a really fun story. So that one happens to be on my mind recently.
My favorite, I think, is the one I keep coming back to let's put it that way. I I appreciate them all for different reasons. But the one I always come back to is Hinda Kittles daughter in law, which is just a spooky story, it's almost a gothic kind of atmosphere. But it's about this the son in a family marries a woman who is very aloof and won't a very stoic, aloof, but she seems to be which everyone in the town in in strange ways, and she refuses to abide by a lot of the social customs and conventions in town. And no matter what anyone says it has no effect on how she interacts or doesn't interact with the world. It's just a spooky story. And it's unlike almost anything else I've read in the literature of the period. So it's sort of haunting.
I just one more story because I've written about it extensively called Friedrich Schiller about a young woman who is obsessed with Schiller's poetry and the operas and loses herself in all sorts of fantasies, in which she brings in all of these characters in the shuttle into the fantasies that she's met in the end of each, like there's this repeating line that she and and Schiller or Schiller's knight or someone are going to like die together or get married in church. And then she's forced to marry this boorish, Russian groom. And she then kind of ropes him into this, like very strange sexual fantasy where they're like riding a horse together. And, and it's a really brilliant story. And it's also I mean, I love that story, because it's also about who has the authority. And in this case, it's the young desiring woman who, who takes over Schiller's authority as the poet, and rewrites his poems in her own, you know, her own intellectual, everyday world. So I think it's a really fabulous one, I think that's one of her most important stories.
So I assume you get asked this a lot. Or you will be as you continued giving interviews, but how does your collaboration work?
Well, it's ..
well!, it works well!
Like, I was like, Who speaks first, it's been fabulous, honestly. I mean, it is such a delight, I think we, we came, I was starting to write about Shtok for my scholarly work. And I came to Jordan, who's already that, you know, as a fantastic translator of the additional had already done quite a bit of translation. And I was I was like, I really think these stories are extraordinary. And would you be interested in translating them together, and he was game and we, we had a grant from the Yiddish Book Center to, they have a fabulous translation program. And we've, we've been translating together pretty regularly ever since. And we, you know, meet. When we're working on a project, we probably chat weekly, and we just go, you know, work together. And we each bring really complementary skills to the project. And I honestly, I've just it makes doing it collaboratively. And always having someone to go back and forth is so much fun. And what I really appreciate about translating with Jordan is I think neither of us is so attached to our language, like we each have an idea about something, but we're always at least Jordans. willing to take in what I say and play with it. So there's just it's just been a really like, fun, creative process for me.
No, I did it. I mean, I agree completely. And while I have lots of translation projects that I do on my own, I think that I, when I come back to look at these, I think collaboration just makes for the makes for better translation. Because you have, you get to hear it in a different way. And you get to process it in a different way. And you may think you're done on your own. But as soon as someone else reads it out loud and says, No, that's not the word. And you say, Well, I like that word. And they say the word and you say, Oh, you're right, that's not the word. So it keeps you honest in a way that that I think is very productive and make for the best product.
So do you have any other collaborative projects in the works?
I'm thrilled you asked ... Alison?
So we, right now we're working on another Yiddish writer with an interesting archival mystery to her Rahal Brofist, who was a Minsk based Yiddish writer who was much more prolific and had a much longer career than Shtok. And probably the big mystery about her life is that just as the Nazis were invading Minsk, the people have referenced this, we don't know, actually, we haven't been able to confirm it. But the Belarusian state publishing company was on the verge of publishing, the first of an eight volume Collected Works, which was an extraordinary amount of writing. And we don't have that many stories from her, we have some books, I think we have four or five of small volumes of her stories. So we've been working together, taking on translating some of the stories, but we've also been applying for a grant from the NIH and a planning grant and are kind of thinking much more ambitiously about trying to recollect to collect and gather the entirety of her works, and to publish the first collected works of a single Yiddish woman writer, and also to think about maybe recovering some of the archival materials, which are probably located largely in Bella Bellarussia, Ukraine and Russia. So that's obviously poses some challenges at the moment, but, but it's a long, it's a long term project that we've begun.
That's wonderful, I look forward to seeing it eventually down the road. And I'm glad to hear that there's more projects that seems like in the past few years, there have been several projects of translating lesser known Yiddish writers, and especially women authors. So it's wonderful to see that as much as I love the Tevya stories that there is, right, that's really a great breadth of Yiddish literature.
And I think that's so important that you say that, because I feel like the Tevya stories and the have come to stand in for this is what Eastern European Jewish life isn't, although they feature female protagonists that are really so much stories about the ways that men struggle with with the transformations of Jewish life in the turn of the century. And it's such a, it's so important to also get accounts from women writers about what that period was like and how they experienced it.
And how different our image of the world and that life becomes, when we have these new voices continuously added to the narrative. It's just that it's a world that just keeps changing and evolving before our eyes every time we got a new color story or collection or novel or, you know, poetry or it's it's fascinating to see it happen in real time. That way.
Is there anything you would like to answer that I haven't thought to ask?
I don't I don't think there's anything specifically I think that what we hope with the story, what I'd say is what we hope in translating these stories and making them available is to is that we've I think we've had this conversation where we feel like we've channeled Fradl Shtok's voice and that she in her lifetime didn't find the readers that she would have wanted. And so for us, I think part of this is helping her to find new readers. So I hope that, you know, I think these stories do continue to speak. And I've taught them to undergraduates who really find them to be very modern and accessible. And so really, the hope is just that she reaches her newer, larger audience and the audience that she deserves.
If people would like to connect with you, what is the best way?
Email, you can find both of us and the email of our institutions on that? If you just look at Vanderbilt Jewish Studies, you'll find a link to me and Jordan, what's the best way for people to find your email address?
It's I'm a librarian at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, so easily findable that way.
I don't know if I should have mentioned that Jordan and I are former colleagues. So thank you both so much, Jordan Finkin and Alison Schachter for speaking with me about Fradl Shtok and her short stories and your work.
Thanks.
So thank you for the opportunity. This was a lot of fun.
Yeah, it was great.
If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite board and brick or online bookstore, or at your local library. Thanks to Die Yan Kee for use of his fraleigh which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries. And you can find more about it at WWW dot Jewish libraries.org/nice Jewish books. I would like to thank ajl and my podcast mentor Heidi Rabinowitz. Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.
Hi, I'm Isaac Blum, author of The Life and crimes acquittee Rosen.
Hi, I'm Lea Shire, the author of the last words we said.
And we'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast. And we
would like to dedicate this podcast to English teachers everywhere. Me in particular my English teacher, Mrs. Fowler in the eighth grade at the Fila in Baltimore. She influenced me more than she will ever know.
And me to Jennifer Gore's Laney, who really was the first person to encourage my writing in high school and gave me the opportunity to express myself in that way for the first time.
The Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish books. I'm your host, Heidi Rabinowitz, and I podcast about Jewish kidlet. Join me to hear my November 2022 conversation with Isaac Blum and Leia Shire and Book of Life podcast.com
