Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers

Norman Ravvin’s novel Café des Westens won the Alberta Culture New
Fiction Award.

Found Treasures is a fine introduction to the work of Yiddish women
writers in translation. The editors have gathered stories by 18 writers
whose work portrays shtetl and big-city European life before the war;
the Holocaust; and postwar experiences in North American and Israel. A
detailed introduction and biographical notes, as well as thoughtful
headnotes for each story, provide the narratives with useful historical
background.

Some of the writers here, such as Rochl Korn and Chava Rosenfarb, may
be familiar to readers of Yiddish in translation, but many either have
not been published in English or would prove difficult to track down.
Fradel Schtok’s “The Veil” and an excerpt from Ida Maze’s novel
Denah are particularly rich, but the collection’s true treasure is
Esther Singer Kreitman’s “The New World.” Kreitman, the sister of
I.B. and I.J. Singer, worked in her brothers’ shadow (she is Yiddish
literature’s “Shakespeare’s sister”), and “The New World,”
an impish, sharp-witted account of the author’s birth, mixes a nascent
feminism with sardonic humor: “because I was a girl, everybody in the
house, even Mama, was disappointed.”

Since the editors’ preface begins with the epithet, “Without
remembrance there is no continuity,” one wonders why the inclusion of
one or two Yiddish originals was not considered, as a way of giving
interested readers an even closer intimacy with these literary
foremothers. Continuity would have been even better served if the tenor
and lilt of the original Yiddish could have also been recovered from the
archives.

For readers interested in the small literatures that exist within our
larger national culture, Found Treasures will serve as an introduction
to a number of women writers who worked, primarily in Montreal but also
in Toronto, throughout the postwar years. Their contributions, as well
as those of the large and varied collective that gathered and translated
this volume, suggest that Yiddish is by no means the “vanishing
language” that the collection’s introduction describes it to be.