Allison Schachter (Vanderbilt University) and Jordan Finkin (Klau Library, Hebrew Union College) will discuss their translation of the selected Yiddish stories of Fradl Shtok, in conversation with Madeleine Cohen (Yiddish Book Center). Fradl Shtok was one of Yiddish literature’s brilliant chroniclers of the inner lives of everyday people. Whether in the shtetls of her native Galicia or the urban tangle of her adopted New York, she sheds a light on the unglimpsed corners of the Jewish imagination, be they the travails of young women looking for love and desire in a world that spurns them or the frustrations and failures of men struggling to live up to stifling social expectations. Her deft modernist prose showcases Jewish women’s aesthetic experiences in a way no Yiddish writer had. The selected stories in From the Jewish Provinces represents the first collection dedicated solely to bringing Shtok’s work to the English-speaking world.
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