>> From the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:23 >> Sharon Horowitz: Good afternoon. Welcome to the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room. On behalf of the Hebraic Section, let me thank you all for coming to today's program. My name is Sharon Horowitz. I am a reference librarian in the Hebraic Section. Customarily, our Division Chief, Mary Jane Deeb greets you all, our esteemed program attendees, and today she had a schedule conflict for this hour, so I was asked to convey her warm welcome to you all. The Hebraic Section marks its beginning in 1912 with the receipt of 10,000 Hebrew books and pamphlets, whose purchase was made possible by a gift from New York philanthropist, Jacob Shiff. From those humble beginnings, our collections have grown to around 250,000 items. In Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, Judeo-Persian and other Hebraic script languages. The Hebraic Section also includes an important selection of books in [foreign words spoken], the languages of Ethiopia, past and present. Our section's holdings are particularly strong in the subject areas of Bible and Rabbinics, liturgy and Hebrew language, and response and Jewish history. Two of our missions in this division are to publicize our collections, and to bring people into the library. One way we accomplish this second goal is by holding lectures and having programs such as the one we are hosting here today. And now, a word about our presenters. In 2016, Ellen Cassedy won a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, the first ever awarded to a Yiddish project. In 2015 and 16, she was a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center in Amhurst, Massachusetts. Her translations have appeared in numerous journals. She is the author of We Are Here, Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust, which won several national awards. Yermiyahu Ahron Talb is the author of five books of poetry, including most recently The Education of a Daffodil. He was honored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage as one of New York's best emerging artists, and his short stories have appeared in Jewishfiction.net, Jewish Literary Journal, Jewrotica, and Second Hand Stories podcast. He is also a colleague of ours here at the Library of Congress. One item of business before we begin. This event is being video taped for subsequent broadcasting. There will be a formal question and answer period after the lecture, at which the audience is encouraged to ask questions and offer comments. Please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event. By participating in the Q&A period, you are consenting to the Library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks. And now, please join me in welcoming Mr. Yermiyahu Ahron Talb, and Miss Ellen Cassedy. ^M00:03:27 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:33 ^M00:03:50 >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: Okay. So, [foreign word spoken] everyone, welcome, welcome. Thank you, Sharon, for that warm introduction. Thank you all for coming during your lunch hour today. We would like to thank Sharon Horowitz and Dr. Ann Brenner, of the Hebraic Section for organizing this program. Dr. Mary Jane Deeb, Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division, for her support. We also want to thank our wonderful publishers, Robert Mandel of Mandel Vilar Press, and Meryl Lefler [assumed spelling] of Dryad Press. We also honor the work of the talented translators of Yiddish literature today, and generations past, who have made this great literature known to an English language readership. In particular, we acknowledge the pioneering work of Bridges, a Journal for Jewish Feminists, and our friends, for serving as a publication venue for the translation of the work of Yiddish women writers. In some ways, our work builds on theirs, was made possible by theirs. Today is a great pleasure to share with you the life and work of Blume Lempel, a writer who deserves to be much better known by English language readers. The two of us have spent more than 10 years, and many weekends around Ellen's dining room table, immersed in the life and work of this unique writer. And now, with the publication of our translated collection of her short stories, we are glad to have the opportunity to share our findings with you. Today, we will take you on a kind of mystery tour, to answer questions like these: where did this writer come from? Who was she? What set her on her unusual path? What kept her going through her long career? Why did she write in Yiddish? And what does she have to offer a contemporary audience like ourselves? Blume Lempel was a unique writer, one of a kind, but she was part of a larger picture. So as we look at Blume Lempel, we'll also be exploring that larger context of what it was to be a writer in Yiddish in the second half of the 20th Century in the United States, and as a woman. But first, a word about how we stumbled into this project, and then we'll get into Blume Lempel's story. >> Ellen Cassedy: Years ago, I began studying Yiddish as a memorial to my mother. My mother was Jewish, unlike my father, and had grown up around Yiddish. She didn't actually speak Yiddish, but she would sprinkle a word here, and a word there, into her conversation sort of like a spice. So in the kitchen, she might say "hand me that shissle [phonetic spelling]" Does anyone know what that means? No? Bowl. Or she'd stand at the window on a rainy day and say, "Amabel [phonetic spelling]" which meant "a flood." On the phone, the woman's [Yiddish spoken], a witch [laughter]. So I hope that by studying Yiddish, I would strengthen my connection to my cultural legacy, and really find a home within Jewish culture, and that has turned out to be true. Yiddish is very precious to me, for its outsider point of view, its humor, its standing up for the little guy, its irony, and its honoring of the everyday. So early on in my study of Yiddish, I was living in Philadelphia, and I told my teacher, who was himself a translator, that I wanted to try my hand at translation. At that time, I had about two months of Yiddish study under my belt, I thought, "I'm ready for this." And he went straight to his book shelf, and he pulled out this little gray volume. He opened it up, and he told me this was by a writer named Blume Lempel, and he showed me how it was inscribed to him personally by the author. Then I met Ahron in a Yiddish reading group. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: I grew up in an Orthodox Shiva family surrounded by Jewish languages, including Yiddish, and I formally studied Yiddish as an adult. I've been involved in Yiddish culture since the early 1990s. A long time now. As a reader, writer, translator and activist, Yiddish is for me a place of primal connection, and cultural imagining and possibility. >> Ellen Cassedy: So we opened up this little gray volume and began to read, and we were, frankly, blown away by its truly unique writing. Experimental, taboo-defying, fearless, lyrical. And there were surprises at every turn. In on every page, in virtually every paragraph, we had never seen any writer like this in any language. At the time, years ago, we knew almost nothing about Blume Lempel, beyond the fact that she'd been born in 1907, in Khorostkov, a little town in what was then Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later it became part of Poland, now it is in Ukraine, in what she described as a whitewashed room by the banks of a river that had no name. And we wondered who was this woman who came out of this place, who wrote with such feeling and with so many exact details about a very wide range of settings, from the old world to the new, pre-war Paris, Cosmopolitan Paris, New York, California, Yosemite Park. How did somebody like her emerged from a little whitewashed room to become such a groundbreaking writer? So we went hunting, and we tracked down Blume Lempel's heirs, her relatives, and her former colleagues, and found boxes of her personal papers stored in an attic. We came here to the Library of Congress. We went to the Jewish Research Institute called YIVO, in New York. And a picture began to emerge. ^M00:10:02 >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: We learned that Blume's father, Abraham Pfeffer, was a butcher, and that her mother, Pesha, read novels, subscribed to a newspaper from the nearby city of Lvov, Lvov, and was considered cultured by the townspeople. Blume's older brother received a formal education, but her own schooling was sporadic. For a few years, she attended a religious school for girls, and a Hebrew Folk School, and at times, a tutor came to the house. As she later recalled in an interview with the Yiddish scholar, Itzel Gottesman, "My father believed that all a girl needed to know was how to cook a pot of food, sew a patch, and milk a cow." In Poland, she remembered, "I didn't write at all. I only dreamed of writing." As she dreamed, she stored up observations that would later appear in her work. All her life, her childhood self remained accessible to her as, "The girl who was. The girl whose tides ebb and flow on my sandy shores, to this day." >> Ellen Cassedy: So, for a time, Blume Lempel's childhood world seemed safe and secure. As the narrator in one story says, "Enclosed within my father's words and my mother's tears, the world came to me as a completed picture, and I accepted its pre-ordained colors and nuances as part of the natural order. Just as the sun rose every morning behind our barn, and set every evening behind the tree that my father pointed out with his finger. So, I stayed within the picture frame, walking in the light, avoiding the shadows, never straying beyond the borders." And this is from a story called Even the Heavens Tell Lies, [Yiddish words spoken]. Now, would you like to hear it in Yiddish? A little paragraph. And for those that don't know Yiddish, remember the words of Franz Kafka, who said, "Ladies and gentlemen, don't be afraid of Yiddish, you'll understand more than you thought you would." So here is that paragraph, in Yiddish. ^M00:12:18 [ Yiddish Spoken ] ^M00:13:14 >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: When Blume was 12, that comforting sense of order began to crumble. Her mother died, and when her father remarried, Blume was pressed into service as a housekeeper and nursemaid for the new couple, and their young child. Her brother, Yisroel, eight years older, had become involved in militant communist activity. He was caught and imprisoned, then escaped, and went into hiding. Yisroel fled to France, and in 1929, at age 22, Blume too left Khorostkov. She was intending to become a pioneer in Palestine, but on the way, she stopped off in Paris to visit Yisroel, who settled in the Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Belleville. Captivated by the city of light, Blume abandoned her pioneer plans. She found a job in a factory, where she met her husband Lemel Lempel. They started a family. Her dream of becoming a writer began to take shape. She began writing poems, and meeting other Yiddish writers. During the 10 years Blume lived in Paris, she fell in love with the city. It became the setting for some of her most important work, including a novel set in the years before and during World War II, and many short stories. >> Ellen Cassedy: So, just before World War II, the family was extremely fortunate to be able to flee to New York, and here they are, a couple of years after the war, the whole family. Those two children. And in America, Blume reached out to the New York Jewish, Yiddish literary scene, especially the newspaper Morgen Freiheit, and she began to publish a serialized novel, and short stories. But then, the news from Europe began to trickle in, and she learned that back in her hometown, her father's wife, and their young son, had been seized and killed by the Nazis, and that her father had then burned down the house and hanged himself on a tree in their yard. She also learned that on the day before liberation of France, her brother, who had joined the resistance, was captured and shot, leaving behind his wife and two sons. As she later said, she was catapulted into a deep despair. The past was a graveyard, the future without meaning. I sat paralyzed within a self-imposed prison. The years went by. Many desolate, fruitless years. She began to burn her work. But then came a turning point. She had two friends who were Yiddish writers, and they suggested that she dedicate herself to writing about the terrible destruction that was consuming her. And that idea, she said, opened a psychological door. She wrote, "I felt I must speak for those who could no longer speak. Feel for those who could no longer feel. Immerse myself in their unlived lives, their sorrows, their joys, their struggle and their death." So she had found her calling, which was to express the experience of, as she put it, "The survivors. The broken people who attempt after the war to establish a new link to life, and who through it all remain broken." And this was her own experience. An experience of displacement and flight, and adaptation, and a special burden of remembering, retribution, guilt and grief. And in an approach that was uniquely her own, she often approached her subject not head-on, but through a variety of subtle literary strategies, in which the great cataclysm of the 20th Century is never far from the surface, but it's hovering just out of sight, appearing in powerful glimpses, powerful flashes. Many of her stories are jagged and disjointed. They don't move smoothly from point A to point B. Instead, sometimes within one single sentence, you'll find Lempel's imagination moving back and forth between dream and reality, past and present, old world, and new. And Ahron and I think that this jaggedness is a carefully considered literary choice, one that is unusual among Jewish writers. We think it's a conscious reflection of the disruptions in the author's life, and the lives of her characters. A brilliant, ingenious way to convey the restless and unsettled existence that she knew so well. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: So here is an example. In the story called The Little Red Umbrella, a middle-aged woman named Janet, in New York City, gets a phone call from a poet she met at a Hanukah party. He invites her out on a date. He is one of a series of dates she's had over the years. Most of them not that great. Including, as she tells us, a washed-up actor, a sock manufacturer, a card-player, a man who had left his wife and child to travel around the world in disguise." So it doesn't look good. But this is a woman who doesn't give up hope. And so listen to how, within a single paragraph, Lempel catapults us out of Janet's studio apartment, into the cosmos. The rendezvous with the poet came like a jolt from the very heart of life, awakening the butterflies from their lethargic dozing. Light, silk wings hovered in the air. The studio apartment, which a moment before had been cold and dark, brightened with an ethereal light. The walls began to sing again. There's still life at close to 50, she said to the fly that was spending the winter in her house. Fantastic patterns streamed through the cracks in the Venetian blinds. Lost ships swarmed to her mountain, bringing regards from distant lands. Magic keys to locked doors. Janet followed a voice through the dark corridors. She opens one of the doors, and inside, a purple light filled the room. On a bed of sky-blue silk, the Greek was lounging with a high-borne lady. Janet swims without moving over still water, not forward, but backward in time, from today to yesterday. The shift takes her to the middle ages, to another world, on another continent. She continues on to the land of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Then, to the promised land of milk and honey. Under an outspread fig tree, Adam dozes. She approaches him. Then, the telephone rings, and Janet goes to the closet, gets dressed, puts on her makeup and steps out into the streets of Manhattan, on her way to the date with the poet. The story goes on from there, and once again, the Holocaust makes an appearance in an unexpected way. ^M00:20:43 Now, the erotic imaginings of a middle-aged woman are not standard fare in any literature, and Lempel's approach to spooling out this character's fantasies so freely is quite unusual. So, how did she summon the courage to write this way? >> Ellen Cassedy: Perhaps the most important factor was that by 1970, she had won the support of Abraham Sutzkever, who was renowned through the world of Yiddish letters as a poet, as a cultural hero who had rescued treasured Jewish texts in the Vilna ghetto, and as the editor of the leading Yiddish literary journal called Di goldene keyt, which was published in Tel Aviv. Sutzkever's right-hand man was Alexander Spiegel-Vaught, and here is what the Di goldene keyt, which means the golden chain look like, and the golden chain means the golden chain of Yiddish or Jewish literature that is passed on from one writer to the next down through the ages. So after receiving her first letter of acceptance from Di goldene keyt, Lempel recalled this. "I still remember how surprised I was at the warm answer. I remember even that it was a cold, cloudy winter day, but for me, spring gardens burst into the most beautiful bloom. The energy that I'd conserved in my youth came out from under my apron." Sutzkever and Lempel corresponded for 20 years, and here we see an early letter from him, complete with a rather charming drawing, a portrait, self-portrait, signed, "All the best, with love, Sutzkever." And while another editor might have tried to reign her in, to smooth out her rough edges, or tame her bold choices, what was critically important about this editor, Abraham Sutzkever, was that he never did. Instead, he deeply affirmed her individuality. He wrote, "You have your own words, your own observations, your own madness, which you scoop out from within yourself like shovelfuls of hot coals. Your talent is not an ordinary one. Of that I am sure." So Sutzkever allowed Lempel free reign to pursue her unique narrative strategies, and this, like the earlier intervention of Lempel's few Yiddish writer friends, was a key factor in the development of her singular contribution to Yiddish literature. Lempel wrote back to Sutzkever, "I write not for my readers, but for myself. I write for the dybbuk that is seeking a transformation through me." Now in Jewish folk culture, a dybbuk is the soul of a dead person that takes up residence inside a living individual and strives for expression through that person, and Sutzkever wrote back, "for that dibbick you must write. You must write for yourself, and for me, and for that chosen writer whom every true talent brings into being through the magnetic power of the work itself. Now, I think this is a very interesting concept, that the writer kind of creates an ideal reader inside his or her own head, and that reader is the one that the writer writes for. "Your prose," Sutzkever said, "is in essence poetic, and therefore, it must be pure and careful, like pure poetry. Every drop is as important as the rushing current. Sincerely, and with much belief in you." >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: Another important sustaining force was the poet, Malka Heifetz Tussman, and here we see a photo of her with her husband, both in bathing suits, no less. And here is a letter, here is a letter from her, in which she talks about the complex and very personal literary home that Lempel had built. She writes, "Blume, Blume, why do you think your poems would shock me? Not so. Good poems, Blume. You dive into the self, and behold, a sbibh." Here is Blume, and you can see even the letter itself is written as a poem. In Yiddish, the word sbibh means "environment" or "atmosphere." But it can also note fellowship and connection. It is a place where one belongs. A home. The sbibh that Blume Lempel constructed for herself, the sustaining literary home, was part privacy and solitude, part support and community. As writers ourselves, we are fascinated by Blume's sbibh, and how richly rewarding it clearly was for her. In Heifetz Tussman's words, "Blume is her own sbibh." And that is an important part of the truth, but only one part. The support of other writers was also a key part of what sustained her. Lempel's work became known in the Yiddish world. As we were able to see in the holdings here at the Library of Congress, it was published in a great variety of Yiddish journals, in Tel Aviv, New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Australia, Paris, and South Africa. She won several literary prizes, including the EKUF [phonetic spelling] prize, the I.J. Seigel Prize, awarded by the Jewish Public Library in Montreal, and the Haim Shetovk [assumed spelling] Prize. >> Ellen Cassedy: In 1979, she began preparing for her first short story collection to publish it, and for editorial help, she turned to this Tel Aviv poet named Denham Heller [phonetic spelling] and he urged her to include even her most daring stories, ones that had been rejected by literary magazines, including Oedipus in Brooklyn, the story that Sutzkever himself has turned down. And the result was this book, A Moment Fun Ams, "a moment of truth," the volume that my teacher put in my hand 10 years later, and once the book was published, praise began to pour in. Praise that recognized that hers was a unique voice, a talent distinct from others in the Yiddish literary world. The writer, the celebrated Yiddish writer, Chaim Grade, wrote to her how sad it was that her talent had flowered so late, when there were so few readers who could read her work in the original, but he said maybe this was inevitable, because she belonged so much to her own time, and no other time. So listen to what he says. "It is enough to make one weep that you appeared in our literature at a time when so few good readers remained, but perhaps it could not have been otherwise. Perhaps your magical, sweet, lyrical tone could not have come into being any earlier than our autumn years. You are a modern writer in the most beautiful sense. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: Lempel also attracted the attention of the Montreal writer, Java Rosenfarb [phonetic spelling], who introduced herself to Lempel in a letter. "I've been reading your work in Di goldene keyt," she wrote. "I feel very close to your way of writing, to your style. Who are you?" The two women exchanged warm and frequent letters until 1990, critiquing each other's work, revealing their struggles with writing and publishing, sharing their views of other writers, some of which are not so positive, and offering news about their families. Rosenfarb wrote, "I admire the beauty and austerity of your language. You are so economical, careful not to waste a single word." We agree. As translators, we found her prose so poetic and so rich that we had to work very hard to capture her unique melody, one that we found to be denser, more idiosyncratic, more well...unhinged, than that of other women or men writing in Yiddish. That one... >> Ellen Cassedy: Perfect, perfect. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: Lempel's second collection came out in 1986, and was called "Balade fun a kholem," ballad of a dream. Like her first book, it contains an extraordinary range of subject matter. In her stories, we meet women and girls of all ages. A lonely little girl who is too poor to own a doll, so she draws one with her finger on a misty windowpane. A madwoman dancing in the marketplace. A mother and son living in the forest with the squirrels to hide from the Nazis. A woman lying on her back on a table, in an abortion clinic. A woman who occupies herself with extravagant daydreams, as she and her husband drive to Florida for the winter. An anti-Nazi spy in Paris, disguised behind a mask of glamorous makeup. A deeply religious African American woman living in Brooklyn. A woman named Pakasandra [phonetic spelling], who tells a lie to save her son's life, and then is obsessed with the fear that God will punish her for the sin of bearing false witness. ^M00:30:08 In response to the second volume, Yunya Fein [phonetic spelling], a Yiddish writer, an artist who lived in New York, wrote to Lempel. And we think this is a really nice synthesis of her writing. Yunya wrote, "Throughout your stories, time undulates. Not measured or divided into past, present and future. As long as we are alive, we carry all times within us simultaneously. And who knows for sure what is fact and what is dream? And who can say with certainty how much arrival there is in going away? And how much going away in arriving? These and many other questions are woven in a natural way into your work." For example, the aforementioned Pakasandra, the woman who told a lie, lives with the images of Biblical figures in her mind, all day, every day. Here is a brief excerpt. "All day, while her mind was busy with this and that, the images were in motion. She saw Abraham's caravan on the edge of the desert, and the matriarch, Sarah, encircled by a retinue of maidservants. And wrapped in white linen, riding side saddle on a small donkey. Pakasandra couldn't see her face, but sensed her royal bearing. And with the utmost respect, she chose not to peel away the swaths of fabric protecting her privacy. The images populated Pakasandra's world, which she tended in a special chamber of her being. Minute as a pinhead, and yet, infinite." >> Ellen Cassedy: And now, a word, for what you've been waiting for, about the title story, Oedipus in Brooklyn. What is this? This was a story that Sutzkever considered too shocking to publish and maybe he was right. You can be the judge. But we find that in Lempel's hands, the account of a contemporary woman involved in a transgressive relationship with her son is not sensational, not tawdry, and not played for laughs. Step by step, Lempel leads us into the heart of darkness. She tells about the car accident that kills the father and blinds the son, of the growing closeness of mother and son, and of their increasing isolation. And finally, the two of them leave the familiar streets of Brooklyn, and move to Florida, which becomes a perfect backdrop of horror for the tragedy that is beginning to unfold. Here is her description of Florida. "A blinding haze hung in the air like carbon fumes. The earth was scorched, the waterways dried up, the white Egrets disappeared. Creeping insects of all kinds eked out their slithery existence, leaving behind silver threads of slime on the desiccated water bed. Sylvia and Danny hid from the sun. In the house, the air conditioner cooled their parched bodies." So, by the end of the story, we've come to understand something about both the mother and the son, and perhaps, even to sympathize. There's the picture of what her second volume looked like. And here she is near the end of her life. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: Finally, why did Blume Lempel write in Yiddish, and keep writing in Yiddish, even as the Yiddish readership grew smaller and smaller year by year? She wrote, "Yiddish is in my bones. I hear my mother's [Yiddish word spoken] in my head, and I lift my eyes to the heavens, and hear God answering me in Yiddish. The birds, real and imagined, speak Yiddish. And the wind at my window speaks Yiddish, because I speak Yiddish, think in Yiddish. So Yiddish was a portable homeland. A way of remaining true to a world that was no more, while she made her way to new places, confronting new circumstances, in new languages. Yiddish was also a way to honor the six million who perished in the Holocaust, including the members of her own family. She wrote, "My older brother tells me what to write in Yiddish, directing my stories from beyond the grave. This is how it was. This is what happened. So must it be recorded. You did not survive simply to eat blintzes with sour cream. You survived to bring back those who were annihilated. You must speak in their tongue, point their fingers." And for Lempel, Yiddish was also a way to hide. Writing in Yiddish could feel isolating. But we think maybe that very isolation freed Lempel to pursue her own idiosyncratic vision. Even as she was being published in Yiddish periodicals, receiving literary prizes, and corresponding in Yiddish with readers and writers all over the world, living in her sbibh. At the same time, her children couldn't read what she wrote, and her neighbors in Long Beach, New York, had no idea she was a world published writer. She told Itzel Gottesman this. "I hide my literary existence under my apron. If you ask my neighbors about my writing, they'd think you were crazy." So perhaps writing in Yiddish in an English-speaking world helped to liberate Lempel to be the taboo-defying writer she was meant to be. >> Ellen Cassedy: When Blume died in 1999, at her home in Long Beach, Long Island, an article in the [inaudible], the Yiddish newspaper in New York stated, "With the passing of Blume Lempel, Yiddish literature has lost one of its most remarkable writers. An empty spot has opened in the galaxy of talented women Yiddish writers." So, in closing, we want to read to you a luminous passage from one of Lempel's most extraordinary stories called Waiting for the Ragman. And it is about her girlhood in the little town in Eastern Europe, and about how her memories have come with her, have traveled with her into adulthood, and this time, I'm going to read you the Yiddish first, and see how much you can get. ^M00:36:43 [ Yiddish Being Spoken ] ^M00:37:19 >> Ellen Cassedy: And now in English, "The young Passover son liked to play with the colored glasses that stood on the sideboard in honor of the holiday. The son poured the colors together and transmuted them into shimmering stars that spangled the whitewashed walls, the clay floor, and the table with its Seder plate set in the middle of the snowy cloth. As I lifted my hands in the air, the beams rained down over my head, like a golden raisin wine that began to ferment inside me. To this day, I capture handfuls of sunbeams, and use them to illuminate the shadows." >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: During her lifetime, Lempel's dream of an English language readership for the most part eluded her. It is a joy for us now to help her unrealized dream come true. As we bring Blume's shimmering sunbeams, and her abundant shadows to new readers like you, we hope we're helping this great writer to be known as she wanted to be known, as a bold explorer of new terrain. As a dazzling stylist, and as a profound teller of truths about the human condition. As new generations of readers encounter Lempel's work, whether in the original Yiddish, or in translation, they will have the opportunity to step into her sbibh. As they do, they'll be richly rewarded. We hope you'll enjoy her work, savor it, learn from it, and share it with others. So, again, thank you all for coming, and [Yiddish being spoken]. ^M00:39:02 [ Applause ] ^M00:39:08 >> Ellen Cassedy: So questions are welcome, and as Sharon told us at the beginning, just be aware that if you do ask a question, your image will appear on the podcast that is sent out by the Library of Congress. Yes sir? ^M00:39:24 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:39:31 >> Ellen Cassedy: So the question is whether there were any outside influences on this writer, outside the Yiddish literary circle. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: Go ahead. >> Ellen Cassedy: She always said that she wasn't influenced by anybody, that she was not part of any literary school, and that she pursued her own path and didn't borrow from anyone, as she put it. On the other hand, I feel that she, having come from this tiny town, by the banks of a river that had no name, became a Western intellectual. And she was familiar with, for example, Oedipus. That is part of our Western literary legacy. She knew about Freud. That is very evident in the story. The Oedipus in Brooklyn, and she read widely. She, according to her children, had a lot of books in the house. So somehow, something seeped in, but it is not possible to say, oh, she is kind of like so-and-so. I tried to develop a theory that she is like a blend of the writer Grace Paley, who is this kind of wise-cracking, down to earth, Brooklyn New York voice, Bronx voice. Grace Paley, and Gabrielle Garcia-Marquez, surreal butterflies, sunbeams, and so on. So you could sort of see that. But I don't think she read either of those writers. So maybe she picked it up through her pores, I don't know. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: She also mentions in passing Spinoza, and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Again, just in passing. She doesn't really cite them as major influences. But other people have, you know, said well this knowledge, this skill must have come from somewhere. I mean, the thing about what we know is based a lot on this video interview that we have. And it is a moment in time. So maybe if someone asked her that question like five years later, there might have been a different answer. It is not like today where people leave a lot more traces of themselves, in terms of responses to things, like the question of literary influence. So yeah. >> Ellen Cassedy: Yes? ^M00:41:54 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:42:11 >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: So the question was, did she have any interaction with Basheva Singer [phonetic spelling]. And the questioner thought that there was some magical realism in Singer. None that we know of. Not as far as I know. She may have read him. But I don't know of any personal contact with him. At other sessions, someone asked about Chaim Grade, specifically, we mention because that person thought that some of the passages that we were reading could have come from Grade in terms of the poeticism. And while we both, while Grade was a master of both poetry and prose, the particular way that Blume Lempel brought it all together is uniquely hers. I mean, I read extensively in Grade, and I did not, I've never encountered anything like this in Grade. >> Ellen Cassedy: Someone also at one of our lectures mentioned Marc Chagall, the artist, and said there is something there about, you know, cows flying over the house and so on, and I think that's true. But I think it comes from a culture, rather than from actual contact between these writers. There was contact between writers, and they definitely sustained each other, but I don't see a literary influence so much as just the support for, go for it, say what you want to say. Did somebody else have a question? Yes, you. ^M00:43:51 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:44:10 >> Ellen Cassedy: So the questioner said that we did a lot of research on her, and did we find any traces of the early work that she burned? And is there a Bibliography about her? We didn't find traces, no. We do know that the typewriter that she typed on, thank goodness she typed, because her handwriting is pretty fearsome, that typewriter was given to her by the editor of one of the Yiddish newspapers in New York early on, and she continued to use it for the rest of her life, and we did find some stories that we couldn't track down in any publications. We looked through here at the Library of Congress, we looked through bound volumes of Yiddish literary journals, and we did find some stories that are not in her collections, but I don't think that those burned works survived. But it was quite fascinating. We had lots of, she had lots of correspondence with writers all over the world, sort of like a virtual café, where in the old world in Warsaw, they might have been sitting around all day drinking their tea and talking, here they were writing letters to each other, and we have those letters. So that was quite fascinating. As for a bibliography, we have written an essay about her that exists in a collection of Yiddish women writers. And we have not put it together, but there are, we know of some reviews of her, everything in Yiddish. So yeah. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: Yeah. Joan? ^M00:45:51 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:46:11 >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: So the question was about the challenges of translation given her unique style. And there were many. The challenge is how you are going to represent, you know, a writer who moves back and forth in time, intense in places, sometimes within the same sentence. Sometimes in the same paragraph, the same page. Is she talking about now? Is she talking about the distant past? The not so distant past? All those questions came into play. It was really good to have someone to bounce ideas off of and to check, is this what you got? Did I get this? So we did a lot of back and forth. We should also just say like a word about our process. We each read all the stories and then wrote our own kind of synoptic reviews, recommendations for inclusion or exclusion, and then came up with our short list and then went back and forth and came up with these stories, and then in terms of the drafts, we split up, who would do the first draft, which stories, and we did first drafts, then sent it to the other person for critiques and lots of red ink and tears, etc., etc. But it was all good in the end. >> Ellen Cassedy: Yes? ^M00:47:40 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:47:47 >> Ellen Cassedy: How did we select the stories? There are...there are another, I don't know, maybe 30 or 40 stories that are out there that we read and decided not to put in this volume. We pick the best [laughter], the good ones, the really good ones. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it was hard because even these stories, you're sort of going along a particular narrative path, and all of a sudden there is this [makes sound effect] total 180 degree turn and you're going off in a completely other direction, and we're thinking, are we going to be able to keep up with this? Are we going to be able to convey the power of this work even with these crazy jagged twists and turns? But in the end, we feel very satisfied with what we've put together, and it covers, as her work does, it goes from the old world to the new world, there is Paris in there, there is New York, there is the women's movement, there is Florida, there is South Carolina. So there is really a very eclectic group of settings, but it all, the themes kind of, as you go through, it is a very satisfying kind of read, because things build on each other, and the layers, those layers go inside you as a reader, and you bring that to the table in each successive story. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: I just want to add to that. I mean, the question of selection is always a challenge, and some of it is, you know, guided by the marketplace, the book is already like well over 200 pages, and so we couldn't make it a collected stories, so we did have to make some tough decisions, and you know, there might have been some that we could have included that, on second read, you know, maybe could have made the final cut, but you know, in the end, we believe in these. So yeah. There are other gems out there that are not in this collection also. >> Ellen Cassedy: Maybe one last question? Mm-hmm. ^M00:49:48 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:50:22 >> Ellen Cassedy: So the question is, this is the first translation, the collection of translated work, stories, and is there any other work out there in translation? Yes, this is the first collection of her translated stories. Her novel that was serialized in a Yiddish newspaper was translated in 1954, I believe. I don't know why whom. But there is a copy of it here at the Library of Congress, we found it here, and you can come in and read it. It is called Storm Over Paris, and it is the story of a Jewish woman living in Paris during World War II, who has an affair with a Nazi. Pretty wild. It's a kind of very different from these stories, it is a realist novel. Very plot-driven. So there is that. And that is, as we said, there is a story here and there that appeared in journals over the years, but nothing all put together. So we are working very hard to get this work out into the world. It is being bought by libraries. We are speaking at the Association of Jewish Libraries in June, and our publishers are doing what they can to get it out there, and we are depending on you to spread the word. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: And someone has just told me that he took out the book from the Brooklyn Public Library, the Kensington Branch, so it is in the Brooklyn Public Library [laughter], which seems very appropriate. >> Ellen Cassedy: And it is also available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and through the publisher. You can order it online. >> Yermiyahu Ahron Talb: And here today. >> Ellen Cassedy: And also in the book store of the library of Congress. And also at that table right behind you. We are happy to sign it. Okay, so thank you very much. ^M00:52:15 [ Applause ] ^M00:52:19 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.