Recovering Yiddish Women Writers: Shira Gorshman & the Making of Literary History

Join us for the fourth talk of the Zhargon Speaker Series! Peretznik Faith Jones will focus on writer Shira Gorshman, who, despite her large body of work (including ten books published across five decades and three countries), is little known even within Yiddish circles.

This lecture will look at Gorshman's work and ask why she was forgotten, and why a revival of interest in her is now underway. We will examine some of the recurring themes in her work, and ask questions about how literary history is created.

Meant to Be and Other Stories (2023), which Jones translated into English, emphasizes Gorshman's "unflinching examination of women's lives, and her willingness to dwell on uncomfortable emotions." The book's description continues: "Her lean storytelling style foregrounds the moral quandaries her characters face. Her writing is plain-spoken, unembellished, even blunt. Her characters are also straightforwardly who they appear to be. In Gorshman’s text, everything is about the situation, the event, the interplay of right and wrong, and the characters’ reactions to them. Gorshman’s stories follow the trajectory of 20th-century Jewish life in Eastern Europe: from the Lithuanian shtetl to the Russian Revolution, through the kibbutz and collective farms, to Central Asia during wartime and back to mid-century Soviet life."

Tickets are $10, proceeds go to support the speaker. (Ticket cost is included in Zhargon course fees for current students.)

Faith Jones is a librarian, translator, and researcher of Yiddish culture in Vancouver. She is a member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, which brings primary source material and accessible inquiry to the public sphere. Her book of translations of Shira Gorshman’s stories, Meant to Be and Other Stories, was recently released by White Goat Press. She is a co-translator of The Acrobat (Tebot Bach, 2014), a selection of the poetry of Celia Dropkin, and she created supertitles for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s new production of Kadya Molodowsky’s genre-defying, futuristic play “Ale fentster tsu der zun” (All Windows Face the Sun).

Jones' research on Yiddish language activism in Winnipeg and Vancouver has been published in scholarly journals. Her recent essay “How to Suppress Yiddish Women’s Writing” responds to the current state of scholarly denial of the rich, complex history of women’s literary culture.