Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn, Translated by Anita Norich

Book Talk Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish History and the Yiddish Book Center Admission: Free Watch the video

Fear and Other Stories is a collection of the short stories of Yiddish writer Chana Blankshteyn (~1860-1939) which was originally published in July 1939, just before the Germans invaded Poland and two weeks before Blankshteyn's death. Anita Norich's new translation brings this collection to English readers for the first time, shedding light on the work of a woman who was almost entirely forgotten despite being widely admired during her long and productive life.

The nine stories in this volume take place primarily in Vilna, as well as various parts of Europe. As if presaging what was to come, World War I and Russian civil wars are the backdrops to these stories, as Jews and non-Jews find themselves under German occupation or caught up in revolutionary fervor. Reflecting Blankshteyn's perspective as a feminist and an activist, the young women in the stories insist on their independence, on equality with their lovers, and on meaningful work.

Join YIVO for a discussion about this new book with translator Anita Norich in conversation with professor of Yiddish and comparative literature Chana Kronfeld.

This book is a Yiddish Book Center 2022 Great Jewish Books Club selection.

Buy the book.

About the Speakers

Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is also the newly-appointed Academic Advisor to the CJH Fellowship Program. She is the translator of Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn, and A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky. Norich is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer, and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives; Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext; and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures. She translates Yiddish literature, and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.

Professor Chana Kronfeld teaches Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature with a special emphasis on modern poetry. Kronfeld is the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics which won the MLA Scaglione Prize in 1996 for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies. Her co-translation (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open won the PEN Translation Prize. She is the recipient (with Chana Bloch) of the top 2005-6 National Endowment for the Arts award for the translation and annotated edition of Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (N.Y. W.W. Norton, 2009). She’s the author, most recently, of The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Stanford, 2016). Her contributions (with Chana Bloch) to Robert Alter’s The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) include an expanded edition of Open Closed Open. Benjamin Harshav’s Hebrew-Yiddish volume, Kol Ha-Shirim, is her most recent collaborative project (with Udi Hrushovski; Carmel, 2017).