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April 20, 2007
In honor of Yiddish women
Arguing with the Storm anthology launched at the Peretz
Centre.
DANA SCHLANGER
It's a good thing for Jewish Vancouver, but it started in Winnipeg.
The women of the leyenkrayz, the Winnipeg Women's Yiddish
reading circle, became so invested in the literary gems produced
by professional women writers in the extensive Yiddish collection
of the Winnipeg Jewish Public Library that they initiated translations
of those otherwise lost stories.
Brought back to life by public readings, translations and the passion
to make them available to a non-Yiddish-speaking audience, the stories,
whose "words tell us much about ourselves," were the reason
that poet and University of British Columbia creative writing professor
Rhea Tregebov took on the task of editing Arguing with the Storm,
an anthology of stories by Yiddish women writers. After three years
of intensive work, the new book was launched April 12 at the Peretz
Centre for Secular Jewish Culture.
The real connection to the content of this publication comes from
the commitment that the leyenkrayz and Tregebov made during their
work "to maintain an inclusive vision, to embrace the wit,
humor, satire and compassion of Yiddishkeit, as well as its tragedy."
The anthology has a down-to-earth, basic human nature tone that
gives the stories instant and direct appeal.
When read aloud, the stories' appeal is apparent in the audience's
reactions to the vivid visual imagery of the shtetl (as in "No
More Rabbi!" by Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, translated and read by
Roz Usisikin), or the subtle psychological love-hate relationship
between the Yemenite cleaning woman in Jerusalem and her Ashkenazi
employer (in the story "Rumiya and the Shofar" by Rikuda
Potash, translated by Chana Thau and read by Tregebov). But a word
of caution, as Helen Mintz writes in her preview (published in Outlook
magazine), "anyone who approaches this anthology seeking to
enhance feelings of sweet nostalgia about Jewish life in Eastern
Europe will be sadly disappointed." Indeed, there is a lot
of poverty, backwardness and even occasional cruelty in these stories,
though these are almost unfailingly balanced by the smile beneath
the tears, the warm compassionate chuckle or the downright sarcastic
humor. There is a pervading sense of the absurd of some situations,
always rendered with a tongue-in-cheek attitude that is quite typical
of Eastern European Jewish culture.
Clearly, the shtetl lies deep in the soul and brain-wiring of all
these writers; however, many of them emigrated from Eastern Europe
to Canada and the United States – and, with the move, came
new tensions and challenges. Usually associated with even more poverty,
language barriers and a difficulty to fit in, the immigration experience
brought along an additional challenge described in some of the stories:
the growing cultural gap between old-world parents and their Americanized,
modernized adult children. The shift in priorities – the change
of mentalities and the struggle with the concept of "honoring
thy parents" – is the central theme of stories like "A
Guest" by Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn (translated by Esther Leven)
and "Letter to God" by Chava Rosenfarb (translated by
Goldie Morgantaler).
And the meaning of the phrase "arguing with the storm"?
Therein lies the metaphor, explains Tregebov in the preface to the
anthology. It is the image of the Jewish woman, mother, fighter
and survivor, as found in Rokhl (Rachel) Korn's poem "My Home,"
published in 1937.
"The poem speaks of how Korn's young widowed mother divided
her years between her fields and her three children," writes
Tregebov. "When the storm threatens both, then she would hide
us in a corner far away from the lightning in the windows, chimneys
and doors, and we could hear her voice arguing with the storm."
Dana Schlanger is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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