Yiddish women writers are becoming discovered lately through excellent translations. After the Blume Lempel and Yenta Mash who were relatively known among the Yiddish knowledgeable, the short stories of a well travelled Vilna based author, Chana Blankshteyn seen the light of the English-speaking literary realm, in the translation of Anita Norich.
For those curious about an Yiddish-English translation of the short stories who gives the name of the volume, Fear, they can practice this exercise offered by In Geveb Yiddish publication.
Blankshteyn is relatively less known outside her time and Vilna. Contemporary with Isaac Babel, she dies on a natural death in 1943. Her collection of stories was originally published under the title Noveles with a foreword by Max Weinreich and was one of the last Yiddish books to appear in Vilna before WWII. There are only a few copies available right now from this collection, out of which only two in the US. The author who felt at ease with the world and travelled extensively, especially throughout Europe, was eulogized as a writer and a pioneer for women´s rights and the poor.
The first English volume of Fear recently published includes nine short stories. The story that gives the name to the volume deserves fully to be given the title of the volume because it is an admirable collection of emotions and contrasts, a vibrant episode from the life of a character, full of dramatism and suspense. It is so well written that one may need a break before continuing with the rest of the stories. Almost all the stories though look like sequences from the life of some characters brought together temporarily, as it usually happens in life. After the story ends, we may guess they life continued but it is out of the sight of our literary imagination.
There are mostly women with voices represented in the stories, and they are coming for various layers of Jewish life, especially non-religious ones - although in one of the stories there is a ´comrade rabbi´ requested to officiate a chupa - Jewish wedding - to two secular Jews, one of them the granddaughter of a Hasidic rebbe. There is a world on the move, changing both in social, political and economic ways. Not surprisingly, there is the character of the ´foreigner´, more or less Jewish, who is entangled in relationship with local Jewish girls. The foreigner is the messenger of a globalized world, and so are becoming the relationships too.
The women in the stories are orphans, single mothers by choice and not because widowed, working women, women not interested to have a relationship at all. In most cases, the location of the story is not mentioned - except Paris - and so is their Jewish identity. Although, the references to High holidays in autumn or the month of Tammuz - actually, the only month mentioned; Tammuz usually takes place between the Gregorian June-July and is the month where the 17th of Tammuz fast takes place, which marks the beginning of the three weeks leading to Tisha B´Av; overall, not a happy month in the Jewish calendar - are a reference that we are moving within the Jewish realm. References about anti-Semitism and pogroms do exist too, but one must remember that in this part of the world, such events were rather the rule than the exception therefore they were part of the everyday Jewish reality.
With calm and cold blood, analytically and observing, sometimes from very afar, Chana Blankshteyn is a witness of her times, a literary journalist of a world that soon is about to disappear. We - me including - may be tempted to judge it according to the current literary standards and expectations. But this is a wrong take. Rather, we should open our curiosity towards exploring the Yiddish world of past times. I wish there are more such books brought to the editorial light, they mean more than any historical reference because they are slices of life as it once was.
Rating: 4 stars
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