Have I Got a Story for You: More Than a Century of Fiction from the Forward ed. by Ezra Glinter (review)

The New York–based, Yiddish–Socialist Forverts printed its first issue 120 years ago. In the generations since that day in April 1897, what later became the Forward has evolved from a daily newspaper into, currently, monthly magazines and continually-updated websites in English and Yiddish. In Judaism, 120 years carries special significance. It was the length of time Noah’s generation was given to repent and reform before the Flood; it was Moses’s lifespan; and, traditionally speaking, it is the oldest age one should ever hope to reach. In other words, the 120-year mark is the ideal moment for an enduring Jewish institution to reflect on its history and trajectory.

Enter Have I Got a Story for You: More Than a Century of Fiction from the Forward, a wonder-of-wonders anthology from Forward critic-at-large Ezra Glinter. No doubt the Forward has remained the farthest-reaching Jewish publication by dint of its independent journalism and cultural commentary. But the Forward has long included writing in other genres. (See Isaac Metzker’s anthology A Bintel Brief for samples from the paper’s advice column.) Fiction has formed another key genre cultivated in the Forward. From its origins to the present, the Forward has functioned as a venue for major and minor works of Jewish literature from both emergent and established authors throughout most of the diaspora. Even in its fledgling years, the paper ran serialized novels as well as short stories. A sweeping collection of its short-form fiction from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, this anthology presents the Forward as a literary periodical. Glinter recovers stories never before published in English, written by famous and obscure Yiddishists alike, and encompassing such diverse kinds of stories as humor sketches, military fiction, and erotic literature. With crisp translations by Yiddish scholars, and accessible editorial glosses, this anthology fosters new appreciation for an under-acknowledged dimension of the Forward.

What does it mean for Glinter to have recovered these works? The front matter plumbs the significance of this anthology itself and offers framing insights for readers. In tune with the Forward’s historical dedication to labor issues, the preface begins with Abraham Cahan accepting the position of chief editor at the Forverts, implicitly drawing an analogy between Cahan’s editorial work and his own. Glinter paints a vivid portrait of the physical and intellectual labor he performed. Almost evoking New York shirtwaist factory workers at their sewing machines, he describes “the many hours I spent hunched over the microfilm reader” observing how the pieces in a given issue were stitched together. Perusing bibliographies for story titles likewise “turned out to be a laborious process.” And while compiling the book was a labor of love, it also prompted somber reflection. Reviving obscure authors meant others would essentially remain dead. Exhuming these stories from the archive called to mind those that would remain buried. Glinter had to exclude work in other literary genres besides short stories, and, obviously, literature from other Yiddish periodicals, noting “One of the great joys of putting together this collection was the opportunity to unearth writing that may never have been read by anyone ever again, and to give it new life in a new language.” On the other hand, he expresses some sorrow over the fact that “the writers in these pages turned out to be winners of a kind of posthumous lottery.” Maybe this project is something of a literary techiyat hametim (resurrection of the dead).

Novelist and Jewish literature professor Dara Horn reframes Glinter’s preface in a sage introduction. (What? I appreciate good front matter.) For Horn, this collection is fundamentally about how we define and what we learn from Jewish literary history. If the Forward had been the Ashkenazi “paper of record,” she contends, then its fiction constituted a “record of private emotional experiences that would...