Join the IIJS and the Department of Germanic Languages in-person on Thursday, October 12 for a Book Talk with Allison Schachter, author of Women Writing Jewish Modernity: 1919-1939. This event will take place in the Yavitz-Calder Lounge on the first floor of Uris Hall.
What role did women play in the making of Jewish literary modernity? We know too little about the women writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in transforming Jewish culture in the twentieth century. The standard accounts of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary history exclude women’s writing and experience. When women appear they do so as poets, but not prose writers. This talk offers a counter history of modern Jewish literature from the perspective of women, focusing on the life and work of the modernist writer, Fradl Shtok. Shtok was a well-regarded poet, who published a short story collection in 1919 and then mysteriously withdrew from Yiddish public life. Tracing her life story through archival records, and closely reading her literary work, I piece together a story of women’s artistic and literary lives in the first half of the twentieth century and offer a new account of Yiddish modernism.
Allison Schachter is Professor of English, Jewish Studies, and Russian and East European Studies, as well as Chair of Jewish Studies, at Vanderbilt University. She works on nineteenth and twentieth century modern Jewish culture in comparative perspectives. Her research interests include diaspora, transnational and world literary cultures, gender studies, and minority cultures. Her first book, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2012) traced the shared diasporic histories of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Her second book Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (Northwestern 2022), a National Jewish Book Award finalist, revises the history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism by foregrounding women’s voices. She is currently working on a new project on mid-century women intellectuals, which examines how African American and Jewish women writers theorized the postwar moment from feminist and leftist perspectives. She is an avid translator of Yiddish literature. Together with Jordan Finkin she translated From the Jewish Provinces: The Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok (Northwestern 2021), which was awarded the 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies.
Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.
While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.
