Yiddish stories in the New Country

It took me an unusual amount of time to finish this book of short stories. I felt like at the end of each of it, I should take a break, breath deep, very deep, and wait the next day to start the new one. Originally published in Yiddish, this collection of stories is apparently only a small part of what Blume Lempel wrote during over 9 decades of life. Born near Czernowitz in 1907, she started writing in the 1940s, after settling in the US and escaping the Shoah. 

The richness of the English version made me regret of not being able to read the stories in the original Yiddish. There is an infinite variety of feelings and descriptions in every sample of writing, and for a while I ended up trying to imagine which was the Yiddish version for a paragraph or another. 

Blume Lempel writes about the Old Country, stories of survival with any price, even for a short time, stories of failure, nostalgia. There are stories that should be written because this is what is left after what happened. Very often, nature, with its beauty and implacable laws and wild life is the complete antithesis to the erratic human life. In the words of one of her characters: 'But what man has done to the man, this I cannot forgive'. The people she is writing about live lives ordered by caprice, struggling to escape the turmoils of the human nature. If for Adorno, 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric', for Blume Lempel to write without mentioning the trauma of the Shoah is impossible. Herself torn by the pain of being the only survivor of her family, she is just writing even not sure about her art of writing and the chances of publishing. This quote from the last story of this volume - The Fate of the Yiddish Writer - is her testimony: 'You did not survive simply to eat blintzes with some cream. You survived to bring back those who were annihilated. You must speak in their tongue, point with their fingers'. In the same story there is the reason why she choose Yiddish instead of English: 'My father and my mother, and sisters and brothers, my murdered people seek revenge in Yiddish. No world language is comparable to Yiddish, with its unique sights, its unmatched sense of humor'. 

Miraculously, Yiddish survived and flourishes nowadays. We survived.