Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars
Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories - An Anthology
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
This book is certain to appeal to the millions of Jewish women interested in Jewish literature and the writings of Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, and Grace Paley. Beautifully packaged, it is an ideal Mother's Day or Bat-Mitzvah gift.
This volume contains translations of Yiddish stories from eminent scholars--including an Isaac Bashevis Singer story that has never before been published in English--and well-known tales that Jewish readers everywhere love.
As bestsellers such as Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander have demonstrated, there is a strong interest in Jewish stories.
Yiddish culture and music have seen a resurgence in recent years. NPR's All Things Considered aired a series of highly acclaimed documentaries about the Yiddish Radio Project and Klezmer musicians regularly play at top alternative venues.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bark's appealing anthology gathers 22 stories chronicling Jewish women's lives in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe, Russia, the United States and Israel. Though most of the stories were published in the 1920s and '30s, many in Yiddish newspapers and magazines, their themes love, thwarted ambition, identity, assimilation still resonate. The heroines, who are of all ages and classes, find themselves struggling for education, autonomy, equality just as many of their real-life contemporaries did. In a collection emphasizing female experience, some of the best stories are written by men. David Bergelson's newly translated "Spring," for example, is a bittersweet story of two sisters' desire for the same impassioned artist. Isaac Bashevis Singer makes two memorable appearances, with his enduring "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" and his gender-bending "Androgynous," which recently appeared for the first time in English in the New Yorker. (Bark posits that "Yentl" was inspired by the unrealized educational aspirations of Singer's sister, Esther Singer Kreitman, whose own short story in this collection, sandwiched between two of her brother's, pales somewhat in comparison.) The writers offer intriguing glimpses into a rich and complex world, and together their stories create a moving testament to the intelligence and resilience of turn-of-the-century Jewish women. As Francine Prose writes in her succinct introduction, the book "makes us grateful to these heroines for having had the courage and resolve to help prepare the way for us to insist upon and even to take for granted the ordinary, everyday, absolutely essential freedoms that we enjoy today."
