 Hi everybody, I think we should get started. I just want to say how important this is, you know, we just went through this incredible Holocaust Memorial Day, Memorial Service for Remembrance Day and some of you among students participated and it's really, really important. But think about how important it is also to celebrate Jewish life and Jewish culture. In other words, the people in civilization that was actually wiped out in the Holocaust. And here's a really rare chance to do this with a world expert in Yiddish literature. For those who are less familiar, Yiddish was really the vernacular, the spoken language, but became a really serious high literature in the 20th century and literature in its own right. And yet it was pretty male dominated and I think we'll hear more about this. And Professor Allison Schachter, who is Professor of English Jewish Studies and Russian East European Studies at Vanderbilt University, has been uncovering a lot of these hidden, neglected and unknown female Yiddish authors in obscure periodicals and all kinds of places. And it turns out that some of it's some of the greatest literature that the Jews of Eastern Europe ever produced. And it gives you a rare perspective, you know, because hearing it from men all the time, I don't know. It's not really capturing it, especially the voice of a woman. And so this is a really, I think, incredible opportunity to hear about some of these discoveries. And I'll just say that Professor Schachter's first book was diasporic modernisms, Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in the 20th century, which was published on Oxford in 2012, which traced the shared diasporic histories of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Her second book, Women Writing Jewish Modernity, which was a National Jewish Book Award finalist, revised the history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism by foregrounding women's voices, as we're talking about. And now, in addition to her translations, which some of us read, and from the Jewish provinces selected stories of Fredo Stuck, it appears that she's doing fascinating work, comparative work between Jewish and African-American women writers in the post-war period. I can't wait to see some of that work as well. So I think Professor Schachter's one of the most exciting voices and scholars of this emerging really, really serious attention to gender in Jewish studies in general and Jewish literature in particular. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Professor Schachter. And thank you to the Bennett Center for sponsoring this and to the Schnurmacher Foundation. Thanks so much, Glenn, for that really generous introduction. It's lovely to be here. And also to Maria King who made this event possible as well. Let me just make sure this is okay. So, as Glenn says, we know too little about the women writers, artists and intellectuals who participated in and shaped modern Jewish culture. And their absence in literary and cultural history means that we understand less about Jewish modernity than scholars realize. The underlying assumption that's governed the fields of modern Jewish culture and literature is that women are absent for good reason. They weren't as talented, productive or significant. And for this reason, women writers are missing from syllabi and from literary and historical scholarship, from anthologies, and from the larger conversation about historical transformation. Many remain untranslated. And this continues to make it difficult for new generations of scholars to recognize the full extent of the Jewish cultural revolution that took place during the 20th century and the interwar period in particular when Jewish women experimented with new artistic practices, embraced new political and artistic affiliations, and challenged a patriarchal social order. Women writers responded to the changes that modernity brought in ways that often differed from men, not least because for some or many women, modernity's disruption of religion's gender hierarchy was a source of immense possibility and not only anxiety. Women took advantages of new openings and cultural production. They composed poems, wrote plays, published novels, and founded literary journals in Jewish languages. And they achieved all of this as male authority was being reconfigured in new secular institutions. So over the past three decades, feminist scholars have uncovered an array of women writers who played roles in modern Jewish culture. But despite their contributions to Hebrew and Yiddish literary history, women writers continue to be excluded from normative accounts of modern Jewish culture. Noting the absence of women from Jewish intellectual history, the feminist poet and critic Irina Klepvich provokes, quote, did Eastern European women really not think or write? Did they not have ideas? Were they not part of the intellectual Jewish life of the last 1,000 years? Did a mere handful write only poetry and the rest never have any thoughts about their lives, about the Jewish community and about the broader world? So nearly three decades after she posed these questions, they still resonate. The project of recovering women writers has also been devalued in Jewish literary studies as a feminist venture that destroys literary standards. It's been overshadowed also by a focus on Jewish masculinity as the central story of Jewish modernity. Now certainly masculinity was an important category of Jewish difference in Europe. Nineteenth-century European writers portrayed Jewish racial difference in terms of male-sexual difference, depicting Jewish men as a feminine, sexually ambiguous, and perverse. And as many critics have noted, Jews internalized these racialized depictions as marks of their own deviance and in turn produced a new ethos of masculinity embodied in representations such as the new Hebrew man or the muscle Jew. However, the danger here is that scholars have accepted this narrative of Jewish masculinization as a shorthand for the totality of the gender transformations of Jewish modernity effectively erasing the complexity of women's historical experiences and gendering Jewish modernity as masculine. The study of Jewish modernity, including Jewish masculinity, not only is impoverished without Jewish women's experience, but it also ultimately presents a fundamentally one-sided, flawed understanding of modern Jewish culture in the 20th century. You can't tell a story with just half of the pieces. So in my book, Women Writing, Jewish Modernity, 1919 to 1939, I set out to reckon with women's absence from the historical record and to show how including women changes our understanding of Jewish modernity. I focused on prose, short stories and novels in particular because secular prose fiction played an important social and cultural role in the early 20th century and it was also the site of women's greatest exclusion. My book examines the work of five inter-war women writers, Fráld Szták, Dvor Báron, Elisheva Bichovsky, Lea Goldberg and Dvor Vogel. And I chose these women writers because in their work they each self-consciously reflect on the role of women as artists in the 20th century and sees the authority of prose fiction to narrate women's lives. They were writing in an era when the literary emerged as a key stage of a new, secular, cultural authority seeking to supplant the authority of Jewish law to govern everyday life. So born in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, these women lived and wrote in Poland, the Soviet Union, New York and mandatory Palestine in the inter-war period and placing them in conversation with one another, I show how they shaped new social, cultural and literary experiments to reimagine the basis of Jewish culture beyond the traditionally male homosocial world of Jewish letters. Rather than exploring Jewish life through changing paradigms of Jewish masculinity and male angst, they probed the poorest boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish culture and asked pointed questions about the necessity of these boundaries. They identified as minority writers in worlds where minority identities were rapidly remade with the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires and the rise of new nation states which you can kind of see from this map. As such, they portrayed the tension between minority particularity and the universalizing force of modernity through women's intimate desires and artistic practices. So in the book I focus on the inter-war period as a moment of radical transformation. A really a key moment when new forms of national identity and minority rights emerged. The Polish Minority Treaty, the post-war mandate system which divided the former Ottoman Empire and German colonial empire into territorial mandates and Soviet minority policy. In the same period that these three systems are created, women also gained hard fought enfranchisement across the globe including in the Soviet Union in 1917 and Poland in 1918 and in the U.S. in 1920. These new rights promised new freedoms but these freedoms were contingent on the social conditions that structured women's and minorities access to the privileges of citizenship and the protections of the law. And this is a really important theme that new freedoms are dangled but they also remain just beyond reach for women and for Jews. So I'll talk for a brief moment about why prose matters to talking specifically about Friedrich Stock, one of the writers in the book and whose work I've recently translated. So in the 19th and early 20th centuries prose mattered to Jewish writers because it was the entree point for a language to become recognized on the international stage. Think Dostoevsky, Flo Baer, Shakespeare. Prose was linked to the rise of vernacular and national culture imagining and creating new audiences. And prose I also argue served as a linked social aesthetic and political role. It was part of what I term the literary regime. So to understand the significance of women's participation in Jewish literary culture as well as their absence from the literary historical record because women were there and they were writing we just don't know about them today. We have to examine how the breakdown of traditional Jewish practices contributed to a reorganization of Jewish literary and cultural authority in the late 19th and early 20th centuries particularly the rise of prose fiction in Jewish languages. The shift in authority can be seen in the changing status of two different frameworks of reading and interpretation what I call the Talmudic and literary regimes. The Talmudic and literary signify two different gendered modes of reading and interpretation. Both are invested in representing aspects of everyday life. However, the Talmudic regime seeks to govern those practices through Jewish legal doctrine. The Talmud, Mel rabbis and scholars gained social capital through their knowledge exercising their authority to interpret and regulate the intimate details of everyday Jewish life. The literary regime, though still dominated by men who were raised in the Talmudic context, exercised its authority differently and invited women's participation as readers and authors. Although the literary might liberate men and women from the strictures of Jewish practice, it also imposed new norms with their own restrictions. So, actually and I'll stick with this one. Male Jewish writers sought to include women in this regime and this literary world, but also to maintain their status as authors and the kind of authority of male authorship. The project of creating a modern Yiddish literature not only rested on women's inclusion as readers, but also on their exclusion and the dynamic is actually different for Hebrew and I'm happy to talk about that in the question and answer. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, central to the project of creating modern Yiddish literature was the translation of Yiddish from a language associated with the Jewish women to a language of Jewish men. In the pre-modern period, Yiddish texts were often published with an explicit address to women even if the intended audience included men. This legal fiction provided an alibi for men who didn't have the requisite Hebrew literacy. Hebrew textual mastery was a prominent symbol of Jewish masculinity and so to admit to reading in Yiddish instead of Hebrew was a threat to masculine identity, so much so that some of the early Yiddish male writers wrote under pseudonyms. In the modern period, the traditional association of Yiddish literature with a female audience adhered to Yiddish and the male writers of the modern Yiddish renaissance struggled with the shame of writing in a so-called woman's language. Shulna Melechem helped to consolidate the patrilineal narrative of Yiddish literature to show in the words of Irina Klebfitz that contemporary Yiddish literature was not a continuation, but a break and it's a literate in women's roots creating a male literary dynasty which mirrored the rabbinical scholarly dynasties whose legitimacy and fame were rooted in Hebrew. So you can see there's a real gender tension here. However, Yiddish women writers seized upon this new literary culture for themselves in an effort to seize new forms of cultural authority. They wrote and published Yiddish prose in the 19th century in Yiddish literature and in early 20th century periodicals such as Di Tsukunth, Dostanaya Land, the Four of Earths, Freya Arbatishtime and after World War II in periodicals such as Di Goldena Keit and the Soviet Dish Heimland as well as in Khajimolodovsky's pre-war and revived post-war journal Sviva. In the first decades of the 20th century editors of anarchist and socialist papers which were the lion's share of Yiddish papers published the work of women prose writers as Norma Fane Pratt contends quote, women's literature was a symbol of modernity and a way of increasing circulation. Women wrote about women a subject which sold papers. People were really interested. Yandr Sardacki, Rachel Bruchas, Miriam Karpalov and Freidlstock all published books in the first decades of the 20th century and at the same time women writers were marginalized from literary circles excluded from authoritative and editorial roles and erased later from literary history. Their narrative fiction was often ignored assumed to be superficial or shunned or not artistic enough to demand attention and although growing demand in the Yiddish press for short fiction opened doors for women writers most of the literary careers of young women received with some initial enthusiasm never really matured. So there are several reasons for the failure of women to thrive in the literary scene a lack of critical attention to barriers to sustaining and independent living I think it's not surprising to hear they were paid less than men and economic pressures pushing them towards marriage many women writers found themselves isolated without literary community and this isolation often also found expression in their writing. Women poets including Rachel Korn, Kaja Malodowski and Ida Mazza sustained correspondence and friendships though these have gone largely unexamined their ability to create and shape community was a product of their public recognition as poets so this is also really important that women were acknowledged as poets but not as prose writers or as intellectuals. Korn and Malodowski for example corresponded frequently in the 1960s and 70s and contributed to Malodowski's literary journal Sveva but in sharp contrast to their prose contemporaries women poets were part of the larger if contested public conversation about Yiddish modernism and they were recognized by the poetic establishment in the early 20th century canonized in Ezra Kornman's 1928 anthology Yiddish d'Ichtereens there was lots of debates about the value of women's poetry but those debates show us that people were reading these women so although women were not seen as central to the Yiddish literary tradition they were recognized as part of the present even if their importance or lack thereof was contested however it was only until 2014 okay here's Miriam Jantos-Serdatsky and Miriam Karpalov so it was only in 2014 that Catherine Hellerstein wrote the first literary history of Yiddish women's poetry and her work grapples with the complicated legacy of a women's poetic tradition as a result of the attention paid to women poets both in the early 20th century and onward women's poetry has been widely translated and mythologized such as in well-known collections of Yiddish literature by Irving Howe and Eleazar Greenberg and Joseph Lepwich many of the women who appear as poets however also wrote prose much of which is gone untranslated poetry was thought to be more appropriate for women who would restrict themselves to women's concerns whether love or nature but the same cannot be said for women prose writers by contrast Irving Howe and Eleazar Greenberg's 1960 a treasury of Yiddish stories contained not a single female authored work none were deemed important enough to be recognized the first anthology of women Yiddish prose writers in America appeared in 1994 found treasures edited by Frieda Forman and it was followed in 2003 by the anthology Beautiful as the Moon and 2007 arguing with the storm prior to this there were a few published novels that received almost no critical attention including Bluma Lempel's self-translated novel Storm over Paris and a novel by one of the singer by Esther Kreitman who was the sister of Isaac Bacheva Singer her novel Devorah which was reissued in 2009 now there have been a variety of single authored works now that have begun to appear in translation you can see a few of them here by Jenta Mosh, Bluma Lempel, Kajamaladovsky and Miriam Karpolevs who are at something of a new moment in which women's writing is finally receiving attention and full volumes of writing by women are being translated women writers directly addressed the injustices women faced by Fraudelstok describing young women longing for education or Jenta Sojatsky and Miriam Karpolev portraying the ways that radical political movements in the early 20th century under the banner of free love exploited and abandoned women women like Fraudelstok fought against a traditional male model of cultural production that denied women material support and institutional recognition now women's literary networks were thinner and women were less likely to be part of formal literary institutions they were less likely to write and publish memoirs to preserve their own records or to have family members recognize them as important so many women's careers were cut short without time to leave documentary trail and scholars often come to these women long after surviving friends and relatives can offer personal histories so the absence of women in Yiddish literary history is also a product of these archival silences what records and documents have survived remain to be pieced together to bring these women's stories to light so in my own scholarly work and in my work as a translator I strive to return women to the historical record and to bring their voices to new readers so I encountered Fraudelstok's stories for the first time reading a review of them by Ruchel Auerbach in the Galician Literary Journal zu Steyr I knew of Stok as a widely anthologized woman poet who was credited with writing the first sonnets in Yiddish actually a misattribution but as my co-translator Jordan Fincon observed a telling one after reading her stories I realized that I myself had unconsciously accepted the maxim I had once heard that all the good works in Yiddish had been translated her modernist voice, her attention to domestic space and aesthetic experience and the tension in her stories between the interior worlds of her characters and the social words they had habited astonished me how had I never read these the PhD in comparative literature studying Hebrew and Yiddish and this began for me not only an academic project but a Yiddish translation project and you can see here is the volume that ensued that I co-translated with Jordan Fincon through the translation and the writing of my scholarly book I uncovered a much fuller account of Fraudelstok's life one that sheds light on the experience of women writers more broadly in this period her enigmatic life is proof that we really still don't yet know enough about Yiddish literature and Yiddish women's writing so I'll speak a bit about her story and then I'll also talk a little bit about her stories but I want to say that in approaching Shdok's biography as with the other women writers in the book I aim to return them to the artistic, intellectual and political worlds they inhabited and from which they've been erased this historical context makes their aesthetic project visible in ways that it hasn't been up to this point whereas male biography has shaped our narratives of both modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and really the story of Jewish men's departure from the study house to the coffee house what happened in their lives has been used as shorthand for how we read and understand their literary texts so I think it's really important to ask questions about women's lives in order to revise that narrative and also to uncover lines of shared experience among these women and that was one of the things that most surprised me is to uncover that the individual stories that we have about women writers as having had mental breakdowns or being hysterical or shutting themselves in their houses they look one way when you take them separately and individually but when you start to see a pattern of the ways that women struggle to find a place for themselves in the literary field those stories give us a very different account of modern Jewish literature more broadly so my aim isn't just to biographize writers but I really understand the danger of that but I want to understand their formal ambitions and how those ambitions align with the literary and intellectual works they inhabit so Fredl Stock was born sometime really between 1898 and 1890 there's actually a number of different dates in the documents in the town of Skala on the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire I think this is an image of the castle ruins in the present day Skala today but I'll just go back to here for a second so on the border of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires in 1907 at the age of 17 she emigrated to New York from Skala a small town on the border and upon her arrival in New York she associated with the modernist writers of a group of poets called the Younger or the Young Ones publishing her poetry to critical acclaim according to the poet and literary critic Avermberg Tabachnik Stock was quote the first Yiddish poetess who stood artistically at the same height as the male poets of her era which was a very high praise at the time but turning her pen to prose Stock also began to write short fiction in the Yiddish newspapers including their togue and their Yiddish erkemphem in 1919 she published her first and only collection of short stories which was entitled collected stories or Ghizamata or Seilingen at a time when women's prose writing received almost no critical attention her work was actually widely reviewed by prominent critics by the age of 29 she made her mark on the New York literary scene recognized as a dynamic writer with a productive career one year later she had all but disappeared and this Yiddish mystery has gone unsolved for decades so what extinguished this unique voice so abruptly what drove Stock to leave the Yiddish literary world and end her career according to Yiddish literary lore in 1919 after reading the poet and editor Leilis's review of her collection which is Stock titled temperament in which he accuses her of being a temperamental writer she stormed into his editorial offices slapped him across the face and then broke all her ties with Yiddish literature dying sometime in the 1930s in a sanitarium the lexicon of Yiddish literature describes her end as such quote over time she became melancholic and died in a sanitarium for the mentally ill as early as 1927 the critic Mel Gravic observed that Stock's writing was rapturously received until one day she disappeared because of quote some little incident in which her hysteria won out proving that she was quote more woman than poet because apparently you could not be both so what prompted Yiddish writers to embrace this legendary story of her breakdown and early death the premature obituary of the sensitive and beautiful young female artists who can't survive the difficulties of being a writer reminds us of how the male literary establishment viewed women as temperamental, fragile and threatening to the existing establishment but news of her death was premature Stock did not leave Yiddish behind in 1919 nor did she die in the 1930s rather she continued to write in Yiddish corresponding with Abe Gahan and publishing a story in the forward in 1942 and this is the letter that she actually writes from the Morrison Hotel and you can see she signs it in Yiddish Fratul Stock or F Stock but uses her married name Francis Zen so the narrative of her early death in a Cyanitarium actually went uncontested until 2002 when Joachim Norgershaw uncovered this letter in the YIVO archives penned to Abe Gahan which included her story A Sewicher von Fels Gahan published the story and I translate the story in the volume it's a really interesting story because it shows you a mature writer so we know that between 1919 when she published this collection and 1942 when she wrote that story she was definitely continuing to write and develop her art even though we have no evidence of actual stories written so this was published in 1942 in November of that year but no one in the literary world had noticed that she was alive and writing still the letter to Gahan offered some clues she signed her name in Yiddish F Stock but included a return address the Morrison Hotel with an Americanized name and Helene Kentman speculated on Jewish Jim that Zen was Fredle's married name and presumed that F Stock had moved from New York to California married a man named Zen and anglicized her name eventually dying sometime in 1952 but even this story turns out to be incorrect so while lacking a complete picture of her life as a writer we can piece together part of her story and her struggles and the literary scene through archival records like many young immigrant women she lived with relatives in New York and aunt and uncle residing with them in 1915 she listed her profession on the census that year as newspaper poetry but despite her rapid rise in Yiddish literary circles and her participation in New York cafe culture she was presumably lonely and struggled to find literary community as a woman whose literary works were in demand she could still only locate a place for herself on the margins she was to Norma Fane Pratt a popular figure in the literary cafes of the Lurie side frequented by the Jewish intelligentsia these were predominantly male spaces though the presence of women in certain certain cafes signaled kind of the radical politics of that cafe in general though there was a sense that women who ventured into the cafe and Jewish politics could not ultimately be part of it the poets of Diyunga often referred to themselves as a new kind of minion which is a term for an all-male circle and although there were women writers in their orbit including Sardatsky and Stock they were never mentioned socially as part of the group and Pratt argues that not only were women writers excluded from male intellectual and literary circles but that there was little camaraderie among women and sharp contrast to the long-term friendships and intimate groups created by male writers now this is not true women did form literary friendships but those relationships tended to be more private and less documented and there's at the National Autistic Book Center where they've uncovered a kind of Yiddish literary cultural circle in the Bronx in the early 20th century but at the height of her literary career in 1918 a year before the publication of her short-striked collection Stock married Samuel or Simchazin the marriage in some ways pretended the end four years later her naturalization papers list her as divorced and her husband's location as unknown by 1923 she had moved away from family and the Yiddish literary world to the Lower East Side to 502 West 179th Street in Washington Heights and she shared an apartment and literary aspirations there with Jenny Betrich who she knew from her childhood in Galicia. Now according to Jacob Glachstein who wrote this very odd article about Frattl Stock where he anonymizes her after her death to somehow protect her from I don't know literary fame but he relies actually as the main source for this essay so according to him Betrich herself was an aspiring Yiddish writer who published stories in the Friar Arbiter Stimma under the name Shandel Betrich in the 1920s but ultimately understood that weakness of her own writing and left the field of Yiddish but clearly the two women found some kinship and literary community in their shared home in 1923 when Betrich witnessed Stock's naturalization she stated her own profession as a stenographer who listed herself as a writer. So Stock again didn't enter literary career in 1919 she actually tried her hand as a playwright and sold her play their Americana or the American to Maurice Schwartz's Theatre Company though the play was never performed. In 1927 she published an English language novel entitled Musicians Only which the New York Times described as poor art with remarkably bad writing claiming it was only interesting as an authentic diary which is actually questioned about that genre of writing fictional diaries. So the failure of the novel marked the end of her early writing career. By the 1930s she no longer listed her profession as a writer but instead wrote none on the census. After living with Betrich we know she moved in with her ex-husband on East A Street and then in Brooklyn where he opened a photo studio and she remained living with him until at least 1940. He eventually remarried and left New York and the relationship with Stock presumably came to an end. Stock's literary ambitions however revived in 42 when she wrote to Cajun from Los Angeles and in 1943 according to her application for a social security number she was living in the Bronx working for her cousin Louis Stock in the garment industry and by 1966 she was institutionalized at the Rockland State Psychiatric Hospital and possibly died there in 1990 and this is a grave marking from the hospital graveyard and this is a really tragic story that during this period of time when she was in the institution was also this moment of a new and renewed interest in the 70s in Yiddish women's writing and the poet Irina Kleftvich actually wrote a poem dedicated to Frider Stock so the idea that she might have been alive and institutionalized I think is tragic. So her path from writer to garment industry worker went against the grain of Jewish history. Jewish immigrant women typically began their American careers working in the world and leaving it behind when they married. Initially choosing to be a writer Stock buck convention for women she fought to create a literary career for herself but like many women writers including her roommate she didn't succeed in finding a place. Male critics wrote her off as a hysteric who didn't have the mental stamina of a true artist and thus they saw her tragic end as predetermined even as she fought against the odds. Stock's difficulties were amplified by her treatment at the hands of male and who believed that women's pain was a product of their innate hysterical tendencies. These beliefs silenced not only Stock but countless other women writers who suffered similar fates and whose stories have never been told and this includes the Hebrew writers Devorah Barone and Elie Shaby Bukhovsky who sort of end their lives alienated and isolated in Palestine later Israel from a Hebrew literary community. But in the 1930s just as critics envisioned Stock's obituary the Yiddish writer and critic who I mentioned in Arabic posed the critical question of whether Stock's withdrawal from Yiddish literary circles was the result of quote the condition of Yiddish broadly or the condition under which women writers work. Arabic herself was a Yiddish intellectual and writer from the Galician region of the Habsburg Empire where Stock was born and she received her Ph.D. and into war Poland where she was a feminist intellectual and Yiddish cultural activist a founding editor of the Galician literary called Suchter. She played a leading role in Yiddish letters and in the 1930s when Arabic set out to write about Stock she doesn't ask her question naively she's well aware of the reception of Yiddish women writers. And by looking at Stock's reception we can easily answer the question. Although reviews of her collection were not all negative male critics' failure to recognize her contributions represented a desire to silence them Arn Glantz Leilis acknowledges the talent even as he condescended to her as a neophyte declaring that the collection was a monotonous affair and the writer temperamental. Moisha Olgen the founder of the communist Yiddish paper attacked Stock's collection for its dispassionate scientific narrative style accusing Stock of describing her subjects as though they were microbes in a drop of blood under a microscope. Olgen viewed Stock as practicing a form of myopic realism caught up in scientific detail without any social historical context. Quote, she blames no one not the surroundings not social relations not the social struggles of the Jews she was a bad communist in his eyes but he fails according to him Stock fails to offer political critique of conditions in the Stuttall but she does forward one she forwards a feminist political critique but one not legible to Olgen and other male writers. So to give you a sense not only of Stock's life but also her work I'll conclude with a discussion of one of her stories entitled Friedrich Schiller. We can kind of give you a sense of sort of what she's doing. So the story takes its name from that dominating figure of German literature the poet, playwright and theorist who authored on the aesthetic education of man one of the central works of 18th century aesthetic theory. And in the aesthetic education Schiller conceptualizes the aesthetic as a state of human development and identifies an aesthetic sensibility common to all including women that can be cultivated to produce democratic subjects. So this idea that art and aesthetics was available to everyone not just an elite educated group of men. In her story Stock asks what the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility looks like at the hands of a young Yiddish speaking woman in the provinces. Stock's protagonist in the story Elka absorbs the imaginary world of Schiller's poetry and operas, his romantic scenarios, the dramatic settings and she transforms them into a fantasy world that colors her everyday life. In doing so she not only relies on Schiller's vision of a democratic aesthetics, art for everyone, she also upends the literary hierarchy upon which his authority rests. At the same time Stock embraces European literary culture as a touchstone for her own literary project where she's turning to Schiller and one can see in this form of literary assimilation in which a young Jewish woman turns her back on Jewish textual precedence assimilating to secular European cultural norms. But Stock's story enacts a more complex solution to the tension between the universal European literary world, Schiller, and the element Schiller and also there's a lot of illusions to flow bare that are happening in the story and the particular Jewish one. Her protagonist do not fully submit to a European literary regime a regime which also rejected women and subjected them to deadly endings and I'll, you know, part of what her story does that I can talk about later is revise flow bare the ending of Madame Bovery where Emma Bovery commits suicide, right, as this ultimate important moment in French literature. So in this story Elke indulges in her fantasies on the Sabbath and a pious Hasidic household that the narrator describes as a Moichum Kodesh, a holy place. Schiller and his German poetry infuse her holy day of rest and her fantasies originate with these poems which she learns to recite as a young girl. She then in the course of the story blends portraits of Schiller in details from his poems and layers them with images from her daily encounters with different men including the son of a count, a young man named Zaleski, and a visiting music tutor. After each encounter she envisions her Schiller and the guys of the other men now dressed in the Count's green riding habit, singing Zaleski's mediocre love songs, and riding off on the tutor's bike with his rakish cap. The details in the story accumulate but the structure of the fantasy repeats itself and it always ends the same way. Her bloody Schiller alone in the field with whom she died quietly. No, they were married in a church. So this fantasy of death quickly replaced with a fantasy of marriage and Christian marriage playfully punctuates the story. Elke's relatives press her father to accept a Russian cousin which is like, you know, consider to step down in this context as a match for his daughter. Her father dislikes the cousin because he's a borish youth without Jewish learning and his Zionist. However, he relents to the marriage because he can't afford to do otherwise. His family reminds him of this. What do you think you're going to get? The church-giver Rebbe's grandson? No one's interested in a girl without a dowry. So their economic reality deflates the family's aristocratic pretensions in the story and instead she's exchanged like a commodity sold to the highest bidder. Elke's father is repulsed by Arne's crass capitalism, which he sees as a corrupting the refined and pious atmosphere in the home. Yet Arne's trade in livestock is no different from her father's negotiation of the marriage contract. When Arne describes to Elke the great deal he made for a well-bred Tyrolean cow, he tells her, Elsie, it's as fat as you. So if Arne's business savvy enables him to trick the Tyrolean cow's owner into underselling him, then what if Elke, an elegant girl from a prestigious family line, which she also purchased at a good price? Stock's playful parallel highlights this troubling objectification of women who, like well-bred cattle, are valued for their predigree rather than their person. But it's the ending of the story in which Stock offers a challenge to masculine notions of modernity. So in this passage that you see here, Elke's husband approaches, disturbed by her, so she basically gets married and then returns to her fantasies of Schiller, disturbed by her behavior as she's lost in fantasy and ignores him. Quote, Arne understood that she had longed for him, and was only too embarrassed to speak up, so he sat down next to her, lay his hands on her wig, gave her a little slap on the cheek and winnied hee-hee. Then his smooth yellow fingertip slid down her neck and throat. So the slap on the cheek and the fingers on her neck are ominous. For a moment he treats her like his recently purchased cow. And in disgust she closes her eyes and cries out, Friedrich, Friedrich jump down from your horse, don't go, don't go. So at first Arne's alarmed by his wife's descent into fantasy, but she seduces him into the part oh, don't stare so brashly. Who's staring? I'm not staring. Stare! Now I'm staring. In this strange scene, her husband agrees to play the role of the German poet staring on command at his wife, who pretends to be a modest and coy lover. He submits to her fantasy, becoming material for her imagination. Elke awakens from the dream with a disturbing look on her face. The story ends with the same reframe that repeats. Elke closed her eyes and her shiller was leaning over her shoulders with his count's pure face, saying farewell, calling her Liebchen and speeding off in his racist cap, bloodied alone in a field, and she quietly, quietly died with him. No, they got married in a church. So Elke orchestrates her own erotic fantasy, coaxes her borish husband to play along, and concludes that fantasy on her own terms, a church wedding. Stalk's story ends with a promise that Elke might offer to a new organization of literary community that includes women who irreverently dream of transforming their everyday life. And yet at the same time Elke is not a revolutionary figure. Stalk acknowledges the real conditions that limit Jewish women's creativity which include the economic pressures towards marriage, and the story her brother goes off to Switzerland and studies to become a floutist for instance, the limits on women's education, and the patriarchal structures that dominate their lives. Stalk's Friedrich Schiller focuses on the power of erotic substitution as a democratic force that refuses to make a distinction in literature and life between Jews and Gentiles, and takes serious women's desire as aesthetic practice because in effect she's rewriting Schiller and revising him. So in conclusion, I look at Stalk's tragic life as one of many examples of the fate of women writers about whom we don't know enough. And in my book I uncovered other stories of women's dramatic disappearance and retreat. But in translating and writing about Stalk, I dreamed of writing the literary record, and of her finding new readers in her literary afterlife. And I invite you to kind of come and find her stories and discover her voice as well. So thank you. Thank you so much if I could permit myself the first question. So you're talking a lot about exclusion from this literary scene, and really a lack of not just moral support but institutional support. Can you say something about what male writers had in terms of institutional support that was lacking to so many of these aspiring women writers? Yeah, absolutely. I think it depends in which situation Stalk was in New York. And so it's important to recognize that both male and female Yiddish writers struggled to support themselves, and many did not support themselves as writers. But men had more avenues and opportunities available to them to make a living. They had structured literary communities. So they were the editors of a literary journals. They kind of played the gatekeeping role by and large with very few exceptions. Sushter and Galisha, for instance, is one of, in this period, I think the only women edited literary journal. And they created and formed and nurtured literary cultural circles. So even when these were not necessarily funded institutions but were get-togethers at literary cafes, they were incredibly productive places and spaces of literary and cultural production and encouragement. And I think that was the difference that women writers didn't have those. And a writer like Miriam Karpalov, for instance, who is briefly in New York and part of a literary scene, but when her I think it's her brother or her father gets sick she moves to go to his bedside, right? And in doing that, because this is the role that women are expected to play, she takes herself out of a kind of public literary community. And there are enormous pressures on women, for instance, to marry. And I think that was part of it. So another writer that I discussed, Dvorah Fogle, who's a little bit later than stock, also born in Galicia and in Levav, who's part of a literary community will you know, she's forced to marry and describes the challenges of being a mother and a writer and a wife and also writes about the ways in which women that men write. And she she's like, they write a lot and it's not always very good, but they get paid for it. But for a woman, she's merely rewarded with respect. And so there's clearly, when there is payment for writing, there's an economic imbalance and Miriam Karpalov, who was an editor at the Forrest, is fired kind of unceremoniously by Ape Gahan and also thrust out of the literary scene. So there's very, I think there's very different kinds of spaces in which women find themselves excluded. Some more organized or more institutionalized, formerly than others. Any questions? Yes? First, I want to thank you so much. I knew nothing about Fredo Stock and I really appreciated your talk. I have two questions I want to ask you. The first one has to do with that first English language novel that she published Musicians Only, is that what it's called? So the review that you had up briefly seemed to me to be particularly harsh. And I'm wondering whether, in reading the book, I assume you read the novel, what do you think about the criticisms that the reviewer made of the book and of her? Yeah, I think that it did get reviewed in the New York Times, which is actually not nothing. I think the book is really interesting. English was not her native language and she was not her Yiddish stories are brilliant because she's a modernist stylist in Yiddish and when she takes to writing in English she moves away from that stylization. So my feeling about the novel is that it's more interesting than the New York Times would suggest and that we would need to read it along the lines of what other women writers are doing in that period and it is an interesting and messy novel is what I would say about it. It's not modernist, it's but it is touching on really interesting themes also about relationships and desire and that are there and that are of real interest to the New York Times book reviewer. Among other things the reviewer criticizes her addiction. Right and that has a lot to do with the fact that she's not a native English reader, she's not college educated and so it's amazing that she wrote in English and that she took that as a challenge and that it's sad that she doesn't continue to do it. Thank you. The other question I had was about her being institutionalized. Now hysteria was a common accusation against women in that period and so why who institutionalized her what did she really suffer from if you could talk a little bit more about that. So I've tried to get the psychiatric records but in New York State as a researcher you can only get anonymized records so I can't get access to it. I did locate some family members who had no idea about her existence and I asked them to request the records and so far I have not been successful in getting them to do this but it's something I'm interested in. I don't know, we don't know. I don't doubt that she suffered from some form of mental illness like whether it was depression or something else I have no doubt that immigrants, it was a difficult life to be a young woman arriving in New York at such a young age to make her way doing that and I would love to know I would love to see those records to see if she was writing when she was in the institution to see anybody visited her but I don't have access to them so it's a deep frustration for me. Thank you. And a dream to get them. Are there living family members? Who remember? No, there are not. There are descendants of her siblings who live in Chicago who I had been in touch with and I need to restart that correspondence because I feel like I need to try one more time to try and get them. I don't know if they have standing actually, I don't know what counts as a descendant but they are relatives so Any questions? Yes Lisa Hi, I just had a question I was curious about what specifically got you into teaching like women Jewish writers because I found your presentation fascinating because I think Jewish women writers are not taught often enough like I have only taken one class where we actually focused on it and nothing before that and I spent years in Hebrew school and still never learned about it so I'm just curious as to how you came to Yeah, so I think it's interesting because I didn't necessarily begin studying women. I actually I started my studies and I was looking at male writers and I was equally dismissive of the women writers. I felt it was a slow transformation in writing my dissertation and turning to Leia Goldberg in my dissertation and then writing the book and this project but what I will say is that the project that I'm thinking about now which is about African American and Jewish American women radical writers that part of that project is about how the canon that we think of as Jewish American writers and their fellow Roth, Malmood, that very male canon is a basically product of the Cold War and a response to McCarthyism and and it involved silencing radical political writers and also women McCarthyism was hostile to feminism also which was seen as as Soviet import and so you know this is an endemic problem it's not I mean in Yiddish literature it's do we know who we have published Jewish women writers and some of the writers I'm interested in are Tilly Olson and Grace Paley but it's a continuing problem that goes back to I think this idea that the way we study Jewish history and Jewish culture is that masculinity and men have been so central to it and there's a lot of different reasons why that is but I think it's something that I'm hoping is changing and one of the really exciting things that I was at a panel at the annual conference of Jewish studies scholars and there was a group of Jewish American like experts on Jewish American literature who said you know what I teach class I don't even teach Roth I teach Jewish American literature without it we can actually offer a very different view of what that looks like and there you can also now teach a class on Yiddish literature and have almost entirely women writers or all women writers and offer a really interesting story so I think we've accepted these canons we've as like this this is actually this is really the norm these are the great writers but if we start asking questions about well wait a second how did we assemble these writers why did why do we see these why is it singer right why is it full it's translated by Saul bellow in the fifties and partisan review and suddenly you know that becomes the beginning or the starting point of the new way but we ask why that is I think it opens up the possibility for bringing in other kinds of writers I'm not saying we shouldn't read Roth or Bellow I think they're interesting writers but I think we need to re-examine these big stories and and where women play a role in them question thank you very much for the presentation I'm curious about the challenges that you faced in your in your research I spent some time at the at the Book Center at the Yiddish Book Center and I'm a little bit familiar with YIVO and I'm wondering if you've had some challenges if you could talk about the challenges and struggles in looking for the material that you need for your research and because I'm assuming there's some editing that's even been done by those institutions in terms of who they've selected who they've kept and that sort of thing I mean I think one of the interesting things to me I sort of have two parts that is how archives are created so it's not that YIVO as an institution isn't interested in women's papers but it goes back before that right like whose papers who recognize that their papers matter what do you need to what do you need to think about yourself to believe that you're saving your materials for posterity and what do other people need to think so for instance the Yiddish writer Dvorar Vogel was very close friends with a Polish Jewish writer I guess they were both Polish Jewish writers Bruno Schultz so I don't know if any of you heard of Bruno Schultz he's a very famous modernist writer until recently people talked about her as his muse but actually they collaborated together and we're part of a really interesting intellectual and literary cultural circle so Schultz's papers somebody after the war like they were preserved sorry but Vogels weren't and there I found this account which by a woman artist who was doing a project who said that she went to her apartment building sometime in like the 90s and that the landlady had just thrown out the papers in the basement right so it's nobody's intention not to you know to preserve one or another but it's about what moment do people recognize the value of it but one of the really interesting things so in the 19 actually I guess it was the 19 there was this big Yiddish in the 1990s this big conference that took place in New York called the Florian Conference and I was just at the Yiddish Book Center where we had this like 25th anniversary of the Florian Conference event and what was really interesting is we were talking about the problem of creating like databases and networks to preserve all this material and it turned out that there was four different people there that had these like lists that they were keeping so the librarian in the New York Public Library has one of the biggest collections of Yiddish literature so that librarian had this like secret personal list of 400 Yiddish women writers and somebody else had another list and so we talked about you know what institution could we turn to to formalize this list to make this material available to people so they could even find it and know about it because so much of it so much of the women's writing wasn't published in book form it was serialized so how do you you know then suddenly if you're going to be looking in microfilm, microfiche so that's another challenge and the current project I'm working on is the translation project is a writer named Rachel Bruchess and she was a Minsk based Yiddish writer who died in the Minsk ghetto she was murdered and on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Minsk the first volume of what was supposed to be an eight volume collected works of her writing was being like type set by the Belarusian state publishing company so the invasion destroyed that and there's almost no record we have very little information about her we have the stories that were she published a few small books and some of the journals are indexed which means you can like you know look up her name and the computer and I'll say here are the volumes but not enough to fill eight volumes so part of the project that my colleague Jordan and I have just applied for this grant and this is going to be the current situation makes this even more difficult which is to get researchers because right now we're not traveling to Minsk or to Kiev and even in Russia where some of this material likely is to try and gather information about her life from the archives because it doesn't exist it's not it's not currently you know indexed anywhere and to imagine creating a kind of model feminist archive of materials that haven't been put together and when I was in touch with this one Minsk researcher he was like I've been in the archives and I haven't seen anything by her and I kind of laughed when I got that email because you don't find things if you're not looking for them so I doubt that she has no presence if she was important enough if she survived the Soviet regime Minsk through to the 1939 and she was having you know there's no way there's no record of her right she's there somewhere and so that's just another challenge is trying to really piece those together especially Eastern European Jewish writers whose papers might didn't necessarily make their way to YIVO and face not only the women writers had one set of problems but of course all the records of Eastern European Jews were destroyed by the war so that's another not all of them but large portions of them so if I could ask another question this might be an uncomfortable one but it's not as if there are no women in prominent positions anthologizing we have Ruth Weiss who had a chair at Harvard University in the other studies we have Cynthia Ozek a very prominent writer and Lucy W. Dovich before them so what's going on here why does it take your generation to start discovering these women without making it personal can you understand what's going on here it's interesting because the three names that you've given are basically neoconsert people associated with the neoconsert feminism but I think that part of what has happened it's not that people haven't been doing this work because there have been really since the 70s there's been some interest I think there's a couple of parts to it which is that there hasn't been it hasn't been received well or even noticed so there are older articles that are written on this topic there were earlier translation projects in the 1990s that free to form an issue what is new I think is that there's a lot of enthusiasm about a group of younger students who are learning Yiddish and getting excited about it and participating in events we talked about the National Yiddish Book Center which has an amazing summer program or Yiddish Kleskamp or Yiddish cultural organizations and they're interested in it and they're looking for stories and texts by women these are younger people who are already bringing those questions with them and that there is more of a scholarly and critical space to tell these stories about women writers so I think that's a part of it and there's a change in feeling of the value of the work and the importance of it and less hostility I think to the idea of women's voices than there may have been in the 90s or the 70s how can hostility be coming from these women leading women academics? Oh, I mean I think you know I don't want to speak individually for them because I think that I can't say what Ruth Weiss has said but I don't know her experiences but I think there's a lot of reasons that women have been hostile to feminism they've internalized the kinds of patriarchal political norms they seek the road to validation in the field of Jewish literature say until 10 years ago it was to write about men so if you wanted a successful career to be heard, if you wanted to be taken seriously for some of these women really truly believe they had to do that by kind of rejecting women I mean I think that's part of it and they were of a particular generation and I guess I would say, I mean I've not thought about this in this way but I guess I would say that it was also the political term that the hostility that the ethos of anti-communism was also an ethos of anti-feminism and you know, and they internalized I think also that Zionist ideas about masculinity that were also central for some of these women in any case I don't know if that answers it Any other questions? Okay, well thanks so much Allison, that was tremendous Thank you