This book highlights a brilliant and nearly forgotten voice in Yiddish letters. The collected stories, spanning Austro-Hungary and New York City, depict young women looking for love and desire in a world that spurns them.
Fradl Shtok (1890–1990?) was born in Galicia, near the border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia. She emigrated to New York at around the age of seventeen, quickly making a name for herself as an up-and-coming poet, highly regarded and widely anthologized. She published a collection of short stories, written in Yiddish, in 1919, and a novel, written in English, in 1927. By the 1930s Shtok had dropped out of the literary scene, and little is known about her later life.Jordan D. Finkin is the rare book librarian at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. He is the author of Exile as Home: The Cosmopolitan Poetics of Leyb Naydus and An Inch or Two of Time: Time and Space in Jewish Modernisms.Allison Schachter is an associate professor of Jewish studies, English, and Russian and East European studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century.
