Hearing Voices: The Mame-loshen Lives

Review Essays 149 powerful. The sounds of her language are so beautiful and evocative that the words continue to sing and echo in my head long after I have finished reading them; the images also stay with me. In the third section of "Basbert," Klepfisz writes about being "equidistant between two continents," Europe and America, and about how she must balance the legacies, the heritages, the histories of each. Both Kaplan and Klepfisz write a tale of two continents and of a search for safety and a language in which to be and write themselves. Kaplan escapes to Europe in order to begin to find who she is, but eventually must return home; Klepfisz sees the United States as a "spot where it seemed safe to go to escape cenain dangers" and which she must claim as hers, since she' has no place else to call home. All three texts measure the space and movement between continents and between contexts; all three texts examine the legacies of Jewish history and the Holocaust and what it means to be a Jewish woman. All three texts record the intersection of gender and Jewishness in the authors' concerns with identity, memory, and language. "Maintaining equidistance is not a choice." In their texts both Kaplan and Klepfisz create safe spaces for themselves; both create a place in which the multiple threads of identity can finally touch and come to rest. Hearing Voices: The Mame-loshen Lives by Deborah Eisenbach-Budner Temple Shir Tikva Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Frieda Forman, Ethel Raicus, Sarah Silberstein Swartz, and Margie Wolfe. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994. 391 pp. $14.95. I remember my grandmother's Yiddish voice. She sang with that voice and that voice came out of her mouth when anger and frustration took over her face. I knew her Yiddish voice would precede a barrage of mushy kisses and hungry, loving eyes. When she told stories to her peers, it was not her. unaccented English voice but her Yiddish voice that brought out 150 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 the most raucous laughter and, sometimes, the deepest sighs. When my grandmother and her friends or relatives began speaking Yiddish I saw them enter another reality, and at age 8 I knew that although I wanted to I could not join them. Since then, my sense of connection to the world(s) that my grandmother 's Yiddish voice came from, and to the worlds it recreated, has inevitably influenced my understandings of the world(s) I live in. I have flirted with unmitigated and generally uninformed Jewish nostalgia. At times I have shunned my desire to connect to her world altogether because I knew that full entrance was impossible. I delved into genealogy, to find the "facts" and the stories of my own history. I studied Eastern European history and culture, Jewish immigrants' experiences in the United States, Jewish Women's Studies, and Yiddish language and literature in translation. These intellectual pursuits were motivated initially by my personal desire to identify in some way with the world(s) of my grandmother'S voice. With all this in mind, I strive to hear the voices and stories of the past without being too distracted by those I might have been hoping to hear. This is the challenge provoked by Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, the first translated anthology of its kind: how can we connect to the lives of those who preceded us, through exposure to their stories, without allowing the voices that we hope to hear, or assume we will hear, to drown out the voices that we are ostensibly trying to listen to? Found Treasures goes admirably far toward this end by making a variety of women's voices audible to those interested in Yiddish and women's writings. As Irena Klepfisz notes in her comprehensive introductory essay, women's writings have been virtually excluded from other anthologies of translated Yiddish literature. The stories collected here are gladly received evidence that the mama-Ioshen (literally, the mother tongue) of our foremothers was more alive than many of us realized. The collection's editors have also helped the...