From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories by Fradl Shtok, Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories by Fradl Shtok, Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter Anastasiya Lyubas (bio) Fradl Shtok From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories translated from the Yiddish by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. 105 pp. This volume initiates two critical conversations. The first is with Fradl Shtok, the author, and her brilliant Yiddish texts, published in New York almost a century ago, launching Shtok's literary career and sealing her literary legacy. The second engagement is with the few texts translated into English two and more decades ago by various translators. Finkin and Schachter translate Shtok in a new way and for a new generation of readers. The present collection presents a significant number of Shtok's stories from Gezamelte ertsehlungen (1919) in a single book, facilitating appraisal of the author's modernist style by twenty-first-century readers. Fradl Shtok (1890–1990?), born in Skala, Galicia, on the border between Austria-Hungary and Russia, immigrated to New York at 17 and published her collected stories at 29. The book was harshly criticized by poet and critic Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, who saw in Shtok not a deft stylist but a woman writer whose contributions to Yiddish he disparaged. She published nothing more in Yiddish after her debut and instead switched to English; her novel Musicians Only appeared in 1927. Shtok lived with mental illness and was institutionalized. The biographical note on her in the Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, edited by Shmuel Niger and Jacob Shatsky et al., indicates that she died at a resort sometime in the 1930s, but she seems in fact to have lived to a ripe old age. The introduction to From the Jewish Provinces provides insight into details of Shtok's complex life and literary destiny, and it illuminates the inadequate reception of her literary work: Critical engagement with her poetic output pigeonholed her as a writer of sonnets; her narrative-prose talents went unrepresented in various anthologies of Yiddish writing; and, ultimately, she was excluded from the canon of Yiddish letters. The English-language selection of Shtok's prose provided by Finkin and Schachter has two principal parts: European Stories and American Stories. The title, From the Jewish Provinces, captures aspects of Shtok's lived experience [End Page 184] in the Old World and the New and highlights, more broadly, the Jewish experience of the many immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian provinces who settled in New York's Lower East Side. The short third section, which contains just one story, "A Fur Salesman," stands apart. Published in 1942 in the Forward and discovered by Joachim Neugroschel in 2002, it epitomizes the maturation of Shtok's style of free indirect discourse, even as it departs from her focus on women as the main characters of her previous stories and instead centers on the masculinist ethos of the fur salesman. From the opening story, "The First Train," to "A Fur Salesman," the editors take the readers on a curated journey through Shtok's creative expression. The eighteen European stories showcase desire and fantasy in various contexts and incarnations. Shtok stages "relationship to fantasy and language," as Finkin and Schachter astutely observe in their introduction. Stories of erotic desire are multiple: Rukhl fantasizes about seducing a Gentile postman who called her krasna, "beautiful" ("By the Mill"); Dvoyre is enthralled by the sounds of a non-Jewish worker's voice ("The Archbishop"); Shifra is infatuated with a performer who comes to town ("Daredevil"). "Viburnum," "Almonds" and "The Pear Tree" plumb food cravings—some extravagant, some ordinary, but always beyond necessity—that betray deep-seated longings for a different kind of life, seemingly beyond the reachable horizon for Jewish women "from the provinces." Such cravings become substitutes for romantic desire, fantasy and pleasure, and even the hope for a child, longings that could not be satisfied. Clashes between reality and fantasy appear in "White Furs," in which Manya's fantasy remains unfulfilled, since there are "no white furs were over there," in Russia; and in "Friedrich Schiller," in which Elka's refinement and longing for long-dead German poet Friedrich Schiller is contrasted to her mundane...