Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories

by Sandra Bark

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446510363
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	09/03/2007
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	629 KB

About the Author

Sandra Bark is an editor at Warner Books.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	xi
	Introduction	xv
	A Note on the Transliteration	xxiii
	Kaddish	1
	The Sack with Pink Stripes	9
	Winter Berries	21
	My First Readers	29
	At the Rich Relatives	55
	At the Mill	75
	The Four-Ruble War	83
	Yentl the Yeshiva Boy	101
	A Satin Coat	131
	Androgynous	153
	Hodel	171
	Spring	191
	Bella Fell in Love	211
	Rosh Hashanah	233
	Two Heads	243
	In the Boardinghouse	247
	Bryna's Mendl	259
	Bubbe Henya	269
	Bubbe Malke	279
	Scenes on a Bare Canvas	291
	The Fourth Mitzvah	303
	The Death of My Aunt	309
	Glossary	319
	Selected Source Notes	323
	Selected Bibliography	327
	Copyrights and Permissions	329
	About the Translators	331
	About the Editor	336

Editorial Reviews

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." (Nov. 1) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Twenty-three stories by various well-known and obscure authors attempt to answer the question of: "What does it mean to be a Jewish woman?" Bark has laid out a pretty rich smorgasbord, spanning most of the past century and taking into account authors as varied as Dvora Baron (the first modern Hebrew woman writer) and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Hers is not a strictly feminist/women's studies approach, for while many of the tales include harshly critical portrayals of the subservience of women in traditional Jewish households, others are anecdotal, comic, or frankly nostalgic for the Old World. The daughter of a pious Hasid in Helen Londynski's "The Four-Ruble War" has to finagle her way into a Warsaw high school against the wishes of her father, who fears-with good reason, it turns out-that modern education will turn her against the practice of her faith. Singer's famous "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" (about the daughter of a rabbi who disguises herself as a man in order to study the Torah in school) is included, along with a strange, lesser-known tale ("Androgynous") about an eccentric rabbi who willingly marries an androgyne and lives happily ever after with her (or him). Sholem Aleichem's "Hodel" is an excerpt from his novel Tevye's Daughters (better known as the musical Fiddler on the Roof), portraying the tragic love of a young woman from the shtetl for a Communist university student in Tsarist Russia. The best stories are subtle accounts of the interplay between the social and the private spheres: Baron's "Kaddish" (the adopted daughter of a rabbi tries to say a son's prayers for the dead man), for example, or Fradel Schtock's "Winter Berries" (an unhappy young girl from a poor family dreams ofa better life while running an errand for her mother). A good collection that looks at a vanished world from an unusual perspective: Bark's anthology has a sharp edge but a mercifully light hand.

Kirkus Reviews