The Canvas and Other Stories
Salomea Perl, translated by Ruth Murphy
Ben Yehuda Press
There is always great pleasure in the discovery of a new author – the rush of jouissance upon hearing a new literary voice for the first time, the delicious anticipation of hearing it again. I remember well the experience of my first reading Chaim Potok; I had taken my father’s paperback copy of My Name is Asher Lev from the bookcase, and when I put it down after reading all the way through in two sittings, I hopped on the subway to buy up all the titles on the “by the same author” page at my favorite local bookshop.
Yet, there are times when that joy is cut short, nipped in the bud. I read John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces with such relish that I immediately sought out more, only to discover that it was a posthumous novel, and that there would be no more. The Neon Bible, a juvenile work published 20 years after his death, was less than satisfying. And I spent almost two decades believing that The God of Small Things would be Arundhati Roy’s only novel.
So, I approached The Canvas and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction by the Yiddish writer Salomea Perl, with some trepidation. I knew what I was getting into when I received the review copy: Perl, who was born in the Polish town of Lomza in 1869, and died in Lublin in 1916, left behind exactly seven stories, published in magazines like Y.L. Peretz’s Der Yontov Bletlekh, Der Yud, and Yudishe Folks-zaytung between 1895 and 1910. All of these stories are published in the current volume, and barring the unlikely discovery of an unpublished manuscript in a Polish attic, there will be no more.
That injects a whiff tragedy into the delight of reading The Canvas, there is a sense of lost possibilities in the encounter with her unique voice. In his introduction to the slim volume, Justin Cammy notes that editors in the burgeoning Yiddish publishing scene in late-19th century Poland began to make room for women writers as a way to attract – and keep – women readers. The language politics of Eastern European Jewish life were complex; on one hand, the local vernaculars, like Polish and Russian, bore the mystique of modernism, and Yiddish had begun to emerge, through the efforts of the Jewish Labor Bund, as the language of Jewish secular political activism – Peretz’s Yontov Bletlekh was a self-described radical publication. The thinking was that, if you wanted to reach the Jewish working classes, you had to reach them in their yedn tog, everyday language.
However, with its associations with the home and hearth, Yiddish was also highly feminized; Hebrew, the medium of Torah study and Talmudic disquisition – vocations to which Eastern European Jewish men had traditionally aspired – was regarded as the masculine language, while at the same time evoking a traditional past from which modernists and radicals like Peretz sought escape.
Indeed, tension between the traditional and the modern, and the masculine and feminine spheres runs through all of Perl’s stories. In the title story, “The Canvas,” the narrator recalls when she traded her unrequited love for a “young student with big, huge dark eyes” for traditional obligations. He is her imagined “bridegroom, the Unknown One, who lived deep in my heart, quietly, so very quietly, such an intimate quiet.” Yet, at the moment he falls mortally ill, her mother joyfully informs her that she is about to marry a wealthy man. Looking back, things did not turn out as hoped, but Perl writes with a tone of reproach, “One is not permitted to argue with God – praised be the Eternal One!”
In Perl’s stories, the parochial confines of the shtetl and tradition offer both comfort and confinement. In “Childless,” Rivke feels secure in her ability to run a perfect home, even though she has not produced a child in almost ten years of marriage. “God will help,” she believes, “just be a perfect little wife, observe your mitzvahs, and above all prepare a kosher, merry Sabbath.” Yet a small detail beyond her control threatens to unravel everything.
These are finely-etched stories of ordinary people in a particular place and time, narrating their challenges and misfortunes in rich detail. Yet, they are not tragedies; life is hard as Tsipke, Khaykil Latnik, and Potki with the eyebrows navigate the demands of family and belief in a highly stratified, often unforgiving social environment, but there are small triumphs, and the consolations of love and family. There is even the possibility of escape to new opportunities in the big city in epistolary story “Seeking Bread,” and the promises of modernity always beckon, often tacitly, and sometimes explicitly. In “The Theater,” Malke, a young wife terrified that she is losing her husband Dovid to corruption, liberates and saves them both in a bold exploration of the modern world at the theater just down the street.
The translation by Ruth Murphy is clear and economical, preserving the tone of Perl’s Yiddish without reducing it to cornpone kitsch. Perl was an educated, urbane writer who studied at the University of Geneva before settling in Warsaw, a bustling metropolis and fin-de-siècle Eastern Europe’s cultural capital; Murphy’s deft hand reflects this beautifully. She does make some unusual choices; in “Khaykl Latnik,” she does not translate the eponymous hero’s surname, which would be “mender,” while she renders his antagonist, “Mendel Shneyder” in the text, as Mendel Tailor. Still, it is a face-en-face bilingual translation, and any reader so inclined can simply read the Yiddish for clarification.
The mundane realities of life in the Pale, and the contrasts, and confrontations with the gentile world, government authority and, indeed, modernity are the material from which much Yiddish fiction of the period was created, but rarely from the perspective offered by Perl. The radical editors of the late-19th century might have sought to offer women a voice in their magazines, but the corpus of Yiddish literature is dominated by names like Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Abraham Reisen, and Sholem Ash. They were all brilliant writers who deserve acclaim, but not a single author in Irving Howe’s and Eliezer Greenberg’s authoritative anthology A Treasury of Yiddish Stories is a woman.
In their preface to the anthology Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, editors Frieda Forman, Ethel Raicus, and Sarah Silberstein Swartz reflected on the comparative silence of women’s voices in the bibliography of Yiddish literature. “For the most part,” they wrote, “we have allowed them to remain lost, cloaked in a culture which, like many others, has hidden the experiences, struggles and accomplishments of its women.” And despite Found Treasures’ promising start, Yiddish women writers like Perl have yet to receive full recognition 28 years later. While there is a growing body of literary criticism that addresses their work, their stories are themselves difficult to find outside of Yiddish libraries.
Ben Yehuda Press, whose titles include the essential writings of the great rabbi, philosopher, and pacifist Aaron Samuel Tamares, and the short fiction anthology Jews vs. Zombies, has done the world of Jewish literature (which is, after all, and enormous and expansive world) an invaluable service by publishing The Canvas and Other Stories. My deep disappointment that there will be no more for me to read by Salomea Perl is tempered by the anticipation that, following this volume, Ben Yehuda Press might bring the stories of her contemporaries Rokhl Broches, Fradel Schtock and others back into the light where they belong.