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  • Arguing with the Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers
  • tova stabin
Arguing with the Storm: Stories, by Yiddish Women Writers. Edited by Rhea Tregebov. (Feminist Press, 2007).

In 2000, a group of seniors with various Yiddish language skills formed the Winnipeg Women's Yiddish Reading Circle—a leyenkrayz—where they would read stories aloud in Yiddish to the group. The leyenkrayz has been a long-standing tradition of literary discussion and from this Winnipeg leyenkrayz came the inspiration for this anthology of fourteen translated stories from nine authors. While all are steeped in yidishkayt, the range of geography, history, subject and style are vast and diverse. There is satire and wit, fury and insight; stories of immigration, family, revolution and the Holocaust; stories of religion, politics, love and daily life. We hear, for instance, with a wry humor of what options life offered for a young girl who ruins the chance for a "rabbi in the family," by allowing an inconsolable baby to be nursed by a "healthy goye" in Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn's "No More Rabbi," and feel the suggestive detail in the contemporary setting of Rikuda Potash's The Sad House in Talibye, where artists and a nurse struggle with their demons. The complexity of these stories and lives brings forward a realistic, engaging and nuanced look into the lives of Ashkenazi women, missing from our culture, literature and history.

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