Arguing with the Storm

Arguing with the Storm – stories by Yiddish Women Writers, is an anthology of fourteen stories ranging in time from the early 1900s to the 1970s, that were originally written and published in Yiddish, and have now been translated into English. There's a comic tale and a holocaust memoir, but most of the stories struck me as being ones about the hardness of life. Only a few Yiddish words aren't translated, and there’s a glossary for those. Recommended. Edited by Rhea Tregebov.

...In an effort to preserve the language, it [Yiddish] is being taught to a new generation. Arguing with the Storm, edited by Rhea Tregebov, a professor of poetry and translation at the University of British Columbia, contains 14 stories by nine authors, all originally written in Yiddish and translated into English. The editor offers the anthology as one more contribution in the renaissance of Yiddish literature, a movement which began in 1980. Perhaps a reflection of living through hard times, each of the stories is filled with life.... .... An important document of Yiddish literature, the stories in Arguing with the Storm bring us back to another time and place, with passion, eloquence and grace.

... Arguing With The Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers would be a delightful collection of short stories to read whatever cultural background you are from. It would make a wonderful textbook, or would be a great interest book for those wanting to learn more of the personal stories from WWII or stories from female authors specifically...

— excerpted from review by Kindah Mardam Bey
AnEVibe, Nov 18/07, www.anevibe.com

As a humble collection of 14 newly translated stories by nine twentieth-century mostly North American Yiddish women writers, Arguing with the Storm provides an invaluable glimpse into the work of a talented group of writers who have been largely overlooked within the male-oriented field of Yiddish literary scholarship. ... As the last native Yiddish speakers are being lost, enthusiastic Yiddishists around the world regularly gather to discuss Yiddish literature and culture, ensuring that the language itself and the great literary legacy of 19th and 20th-century Yiddish writers lives on. It was out of one such group, the Winnipeg Yiddish Women's Reading Circle ... that this collection was born. In her preface outlining the anthology's evolution, Rhea Tregebov writes that their primary concern was to make the stories as broadly accessible as possible, in the hopes that other Yiddish groups might in turn be inspired.

The anthology's title refers to a poem by Yiddish poet Rachel Korn about a mother's defiant defense of her family from an impending storm, serving as a "paradigm of courage and resistance" for the lives of the Jewish women who wrote and inhabit these stories. Many of them portray the bitter suffering of poverty, and the ways poor Jewish women struggled to sustain themselves and their children. Especially moving are "The Apple of Her Eye" by Malka Lee, set in the slums of 1920s New York, and "Little Abrahams" by Rochel Broches, set in pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia, in which we see the hunger, isolation and bleakness of poverty through the eyes of a young child. Winding its way through these stories is the theme of a hunger which cannot be appeased. Anne Viderman's "A Fiddle" tells the tragic tale of a young Ukrainian musician's frustrated appetite for the wider world. Bryna Bercovitch's memoir recounts how she became a revolutionary in response to growing up always hungry in turn-of-the-century Ukraine. Hunger is laid bare most painfully in "A Natural Death," Paula Frankel-Zaltzman's stark portrayal of a father and daughter slowly starving to death in Latvia's Dvinsk Ghetto during World War II.

A surprising diversity of themes is represented in this small collection. Family plays a central role, especially the challenging relationships between parents and adult children. Like their most famous male counterparts, these female Yiddish authors explore the transition and incongruity between the Old World and the New, often exemplified in the vast divide which springs up between older parents and their modern, American-born children (e.g. "A Guest" by Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn). In stories written by survivors, the physical and psychological suffering of the Holocaust is a potent, devastating presence, the trauma bleeding through into the characters' lives long after the war. The strong socialist emphasis in Yiddish writing comes through n pieces with both literary and historical value, such as Frume Halpern's moralist parables portraying the costs for women who fail to live their lives by Leftist revolutionary ideals. Rounding out the collection, Rikuda Potash in "Rumiyah and the Shofar" and Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn in "No More Rabbi" also touch on religion, how Jewish women sometimes found themselves at odds with religious traditions that conflicted with their desires.

A highlight of the anthology is "Letters to God," contributed by Chana Rosenfarb, one of Canada's most celebrated Yiddish authors. This story about a middle-class Holocaust survivor caring for his dying father stands out with a brilliant translation by Goldie Morgentaler and captivating writing, replete with rich imagery and complex structure and emotionality. Originally published almost 30 years after the other stories, "Letters to God" at first seems to break up the coherence of the collection, but ultimately its inclusion is a strength, contributing to the anthology's diversity and refusing the condensation of all Yiddish women's writing into one type of story.

Perhaps one weakness of this collection is that the stories included tend overly to the darkly tragic, and there are too few glimpses of the wry humour for which Yiddish is so famous. Nonetheless, Arguing with the Storm gives us a tantalizing taste of the variety and talent within Yiddish women's writing, and in so doing, accomplishes its goal of inspiring readers to delve further into this little-known wealth of Yiddish literature.

... Since the 1980s there has been a concerted worldwide effort to revive the Yiddish language and its vast literary legacy. This Winnipeg inspired anthology is certain to add to that renaissance.

... Editor Rhea Tregebov explains in her introduction how a women's reading circle in Winnipeg, dedicated to the work of both little-known and well-known Yiddish women writers, transformed itself into an editorial and translating collective with the goal of creating an anthology. The accomplishment of the Winnipeg Women's Yiddish Reading Circle reflects a continuing interest in Yiddish; the popularity of 'life writing' as a source of self-reflection; and the influence of women's reading and study groups on literary tastes... .

... Arguing with the Storm is clearly a labour of love, a grassroots literary undertaking with broad literary appeal.

... Editor Rhea Tregebov gets full marks for following up on the ingenious idea of her mother, Jeanette Block, a Winnipeg librarian who leads a Yiddish reading circle, or leyendrayze. So enthusiastic were individual members of the leyendrayze that they began translating their favourite stories by Yiddish women writers into English. Enter editor-daughter Tregebov, best known as a poet, and Arguing with the Storm was launched...