short stories – C.M. Mayo's Book Notes & Convos

Q & A: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Writing Fiction and Her Latest Collection, “Known By Heart”

“Every one of us, every single one of us, has a story,
has longings, joys and sorrows.”
––Ellen Prentiss Campbell

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

One of my favorite American writers is my esteemed amiga, Ellen Prentiss Campbell. She’s the author of a splendid historical novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, as well as an earlier collection of short stories, Contents Under Pressure. May 1st is the pub date for her latest, Known by Heart: Collected Stories.

Here’s the catalog copy for Known by Heart:

Love is necessary but not easy in these stories of love’s joys and challenges, regrets and uncertainties. Complicated people fall in and out of love, care for each other, delight each other, disappoint each other, yearn for each other. Ellen Prentiss Campbell tells of all sorts of love: young love, lost love, love found perhaps too late, family love, love between friends. Her writing has been praised for its realism and grace. These untraditional love stories illustrate that love is essential, but not for the faint of heart.

“Keen psychological insight and a poetic flair for language bring these stories to vivid life. Campbell’s characters struggle to escape their dilemmas, whether the confines of stifling families or their own minds. To the reader’s delight, some characters pop up in multiple stories, weaving a world of recognizable human longings that are credible, poignant, and beautifully described.”
—Donna Baier Stein, author of Scenes from the Heartland

C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write short fiction, as opposed to a novel?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: The two inspirations—short fiction, novel—aren’t mutually exclusive. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes run on parallel tracks. These stories were written over a period of many years. During that time I began a story which jumped the short story track and became my first novel The Bowl with Gold Seams. And while working on that novel, I wrote other stories, and once again, a story jumped the track and became my current novel in progress. And although this collection Known By Heart is not a novel in stories, some characters—the couple, Meg and Walker—appear in more than one story (in fact, Meg and Walker were also in a story in my first collection, Contents Under Pressure). It’s been said that short stories are close kin to poetry. That makes sense to me. I don’t write poetry, but a story does have, within it, a complete arc. It’s not a part of something smaller, it’s not a chapter in a novel. It’s a mystery why some stories jump the track and demand the longer journey.

C.M. MAYO: How has your background practicing psychotherapy informed your fiction?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: As a psychotherapist, I listened closely to stories, endeavored to help clients identify threads of meaning in their dilemmas, their pain. It’s a privilege, to do the work. I kept an absolute firewall between my work as a therapist and my writing, never wrote and would never write about my clients. But from doing the work I know that everyone of us, every single one of us, has a story, has longings, joys and sorrows. When I was listening to my clients, I was trying always to understand. And writing fiction is a different but related kind of listening—listening to my characters, trying to understand.

C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to read one story in your collection, which one would you most recommend and why?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: Catherine! You are asking me to play favorites! But if I had to choose, I would say Ruby. Partly perhaps because I wrote it most recently, it’s close to me in that immediate way. But also because—and this is partly due to my work with aging clients as a therapist, but more because of my own experience growing older—the story is told from the point of view of an older character, looking back, but still very much, very passionately engaged in the present human moment.

C.M. MAYO: As you were writing these, did you have in mind an ideal reader?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: I don’t consciously write for an ideal reader, but I do write what I love to read myself—fiction about people, relationships, the stakes and cost of loving, of trying to connect. And I am fortunate to have several close to ideal readers with whom I share my drafts, whose responses inform my work—my husband, my best friend (we’ve been reading and writing together since we were eight), a dear friend and writer I met while doing my MFA at Bennington.

C.M. MAYO: Can you describe the ideal reader for these stories as you see him or her now?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: Well, Catherine, as you know spring of 2020 is an odd season to be bringing out a book, and this is a collection of stories that are really love stories—untraditional love stories, but stories about yearning for shared connection and meaning. This is certainly a moment when we’re aware of needing each other, needing to care. So I hope for a reader with an open heart and mind, a reader who is looking to be reminded that social distancing doesn’t have to make us emotionally cold or distant from others.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers have been the most important influences for you?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: William Maxwell has been a huge influence on me. His novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, is among my very favorites. He gets right to the quiet emotional heart, and his prose is simple but lyrical. I just wrote an essay about his correspondence with Eudora Welty. Marilynne Robinson is another, my copy paperback copy of Housekeeping is almost disintegrating.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers are you reading now?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: Right this moment, this quiet interior life we’re living, is a good time for reading, isn’t it? I am reading War and Peace for the first time, with the online reading group A Public Space offers. And I am reading my way through the mysteries of Ross MacDonald. I discovered him through William Maxwell, indirectly, as he was also one of Eudora Welty’s friends and correspondents. Luckily my daughter has a shelf of his books and has lent them to me.

C.M. MAYO: How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: The Digital Revolution is certainly a blessing and a curse! More blessing than curse, especially now as it enables connection with so many writers, and friends, and the news from around the world. But it is easy to fall into the rabbit hole of reading, and posting, and tweeting, and reading. I try to set some limits—have screen-free time, put my phone away. It’s harder to do now but especially during this season of quarantine I am experimenting with having the weekend be a time for not a complete break but reading only on paper. We have an old farm in Pennsylvania, without wi-fi. I love to go up there by myself and write. I even have a green Hermes 3000 in the attic and can bang away on it (just letters, not fiction)—not something my apartment house neighbors would like. I long to go up to the farm when quarantine lifts.

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you or problematic?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: I returned to writing fiction after a long hiatus about 20 years ago, and at that time started writing on my computer. So my current writing practice has been and remains working on my laptop. My fingers and my brain are totally connected on the keyboard. However when I have a draft to revise I print it out, and then make pencil edits, and re-type the new version from the print manuscript. It’s a trick author Alice Mattison taught me and I recommend it.

C.M. MAYO: For those looking to publish, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: You taught it to me at one of my first workshops with you at the Bethesda Writers Center. “Success goes to she who pays the most postage.” Of course now, no postage, but success still requires submitting, submitting, submitting, and developing the infamously thick skin necessary to cope with rejection.

C.M. MAYO: What piece of advice would you offer to another writer who is just starting out?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: Read, read, read, read—and find people who, like you, are writers who love to read.

C.M. MAYO: What important piece of advice would you offer if you could travel back in time, to your own thirty-year old self?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: Write. Don’t wait. As Ovid said, “Sing your song now, you cannot take it with you when you go.”

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you?

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL: Well, aside from my fantasy of going swimming again when the quarantine is over? (It’s a part of my routine than helps me write and stay sane!) I have a close to completed second novel I hope to get out into the world—historical fiction again, inspired by renowned psychotherapist Frieda Fromm Reichmann. And I have started researching another new novel—for the first time a novel that intends to be a novel from the outset, not a story first that jumps the track…

Visit Ellen Prentiss Campbell at www.ellencampbell.net.

Q & A: Mary Mackey on The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams

A Review of Claudio Saunt’s
West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776

A Writerly Tool for Sharpening Attentional Focus or,
The Easy Luxury of a Lap Desk

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

Q & A: Ellen Cassedy, Translator of “On the Landing,” Stories by Yenta Mash, Master Chronicler of Exile

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is, except when not, dedicated to a Q & A with another writer.

*On the Landing: Stories by Yenta Mash,* translated by Ellen Cassedy (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018)

Yenta Mash and her stories will be remembered because they have rare and masterful elegance, uncanny insight into vast prairie-like swaths human nature, and unusual heart. They also tell stories entirely new for many English-speaking people, that of the Jewish exiles to Siberia under Stalin during World War II, and their later migration to Israel. Translator Ellen Cassedy’s is a transcendent achievement; with Mash’s On the Landing she has brought a landmark book into English.

Translator Ellen Cassedy’s is a transcendent achievement; with Mash’s On the Landing she has brought a landmark book into English.

Ellen Cassedy is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust and co-translator (with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub) of Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel. She was a 2015 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, and On the Landing is a result of her fellowship. Her website is www.ellencassedy.com.

C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for these stories?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Anyone interested in fine literature! Mash is a great read – clear, sometimes funny, and full of ground-level truths about what it was like to live through great cataclysms of the 20^th Century.

C.M. MAYO: When and why were you inspired to translate Yenta Mash?

ELLEN CASSEDY: I learned of Mash’s work through the Yiddish Book Center’s translation fellowship program. Having died in 2013, she’s basically a contemporary writer. She was a down-to-earth and often witty observer of a changing world, who drew on her own life of multiple uprootings in telling the stories of people who are forever on the move.

Even in the most harrowing settings, Mash is somehow inspiring. Young and old, her characters are solid, sturdy people with a sense of humor. They’re survivors, people who land on their feet.

The collection begins in a vibrant Jewish town reminiscent of the one in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

We then join women prisoners being transported into the Siberian gulag, with its frozen steppes, snowy forests, and surging rivers. After the exile, we see the Jewish community rebuilding itself behind the postwar Iron Curtain. Finally, we join refugees in Israel in the 1970’s, struggling with the challenges of assimilation and the awkwardness of a land where young people instruct their elders, instead of the other way around.

C.M. MAYO: You are also a translator of the Yiddish writer Blume Lempel. Both Lempel and Mash write of suffering, exile, and grief, and yet they are very different writers, with very different experiences during and after the war. In a writerly sense, what are some of the differences that especially strike you?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Mash (1922-2013) and Blume Lempel (1907-1999) grew up in tiny towns in Eastern Europe, not far apart from each other. Both suffered persecution, displacement, and appalling losses.

Lempel left home for Paris as a young woman, fled to America in 1939, and spent the remainder of her life in New York. Her work feels shattered, fractured, unhinged. Her gemlike, poetic style and decidedly unconventional narrative strategies take readers into a realm of trauma and madness. The title story, “Oedipus in Brooklyn,” is Exhibit #1 of her taboo-defying oeuvre.

As a young woman, Mash was deported to Siberia by the Soviets in 1941. She did seven years of hard labor there, then spent three decades in Soviet Moldova before immigrating to Israel in the 1970’s. Her work bears witness in an urgent, orderly, and exacting fashion to a life full of tumult. Her language is alive with regionalisms carried to new places, bits of multiple languages picked up along the way, and neologisms invented to describe new circumstances.

C.M. MAYO: In our last interview, about your translation (with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub) of Lempel’s stories, Oedipus in Brooklyn, I was intrigued, if not surprised, to learn that she corresponded with the poet Menke Katz. Would Blume Lempel and Yenta Mash have corresponded, or have corresponded with anyone in common in Yiddish and other literary circles?

ELLEN CASSEDY: The world of Yiddish writers after World War II was like a virtual café on a global scale. Yiddish newspapers, literary journals, and literary prizes flourished, as did intense epistolary friendships. I don’t have any evidence that Mash and Lempel corresponded, but they must have read each other’s work in Di goldene keyt, the flagship literary journal published in Tel Aviv. And they knew some of the same Yiddish literary figures, including the eminent poet and journal editor Abraham Sutzkever.

“The world of Yiddish writers after World War II was like a virtual café on a global scale. “

C.M. MAYO: How did working on On the Landing compare to working on Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn and to your other translation projects?

ELLEN CASSEDY: I was fortunate to have Yermiyahu Ahron Taub as a co-translator for the Lempel project. We had a rich collaboration, full of constant back and forth. For the Mash project, I drew on the resources of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA – a wonderful organization that provided me with mentors and a vibrant and an engaged community.

I did the English translation for Yiddish Zoo, a collection of Yiddish poetry for children in three languages. That was a joyful romp with lions and tigers and bears – great fun.

Now I’m working with a gifted cartoonist who’s embarked on a graphic project involving handwritten Yiddish archives. Quite a decoding challenge!

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about Yenta Mash’s literary influences? (And in which languages did she read?)

ELLEN CASSEDY: Mash knew Russian, Rumanian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. She was drawn to Yiddish literature from early childhood. As a small child, she knew poems by Y.L. Peretz by heart and was familiar with the classical Yiddish writers Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Moykher Sforim. After her years in Siberia, she joined the vibrant Jewish literary circle in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau. But it wasn’t until she was in her fifties, when she immigrated to Israel, that she began to write. She joined the Yiddish literary scene in Israel and was a member of Leivick House, a Yiddish cultural center.

The red marker in this screenshot from Google Maps shows Chisinau, in Moldova, where Yenta Mash lived after her exile to Siberia.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers, in any language, could you compare her to?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Yenta Mash is a master chronicler of exile. Her characters are always on their way to somewhere or from somewhere. That’s why I chose the name “On the Landing,” the name of one of her stories, for the title of my translated collection.

“Yenta Mash is a master chronicler of exile.”

I compare her to other voices of assimilation and resilience – Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake), André Aciman (Out of Egypt), and Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Refugees). Her work is keenly relevant today as displaced people seek refuge across the globe.

C.M. MAYO: I am astonished that writing of such quality is only appearing in English for the first time in 2018. Is there more?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Absolutely! Only a fraction of Yiddish literature from the past 150 years has ever been translated into English. As we gain access to more and more of these buried treasures, I believe Yiddish literature will take its rightful place in the world, as what has been called “a major literature in a minor language.”

“As we gain access to more and more of these buried treasures, I believe Yiddish literature will take its rightful place in the world, as what has been called ‘a major literature in a minor language.'”

There’s an expression in Yiddish, “di goldene keyt,” the golden chain, which refers to how Yiddish literature has been passed down through the ages, with one writer after another adding links to the chain. Yiddish was the language that my Jewish forebears spoke in kitchens, marketplaces, and meeting halls on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m thrilled to be able to add my own link to the chain.

Q & A with Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub on Translating Blume Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn from the Yiddish

Q & A with David A. Taylor, Author of Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II

Translating Across the Border

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

Q & A: Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub on Translating Blume Lempel’s “Oedipus in Brooklyn” from the Yiddish

Strange, muscled, riven with grief, Blume Lempel’s short stories, many set in the U.S., are for the ages. Yet because Lempel wrote in Yiddish, few aficionados of the form have had the chance to read her— until now, with the translation by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories.

Excerpts from the catalog copy of the publishers, Dryad Press and Mandel Vilar:

“Lempel (1907–1999) was one of a small number of writers in the United States who wrote in Yiddish into the 1990s. Though many of her stories opened a window on the Old World and the Holocaust, she did not confine herself to these landscapes or themes. She often wrote about the margins of society, and about subjects considered untouchable. Her prize-winning fiction is remarkable for its psychological acuity, its unflinching examination of erotic themes and gender relations, and its technical virtuosity. Mirroring the dislocation of mostly women protagonists, her stories move between present and past, Old World and New, dream and reality…

“Immigrating to New York when Hitler rose to power, Blume Lempel began publishing her short stories in 1945. By the 1970s her work had become known throughout the Yiddish literary world. When she died in 1999, the Yiddish paper Forverts wrote: ‘Yiddish literature has lost one of its most remarkable women writers.'”

Ellen Cassedy, translator, is author of the award-winning study We Are Here, about the Lithuanian Holocaust. With her colleague Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, they received the Yiddish Book Center 2012 Translation Prize for translating Blume Lempel.

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of several books of poetry, including Prayers of a Heretic/Tfiles fun an apikoyres (2013), Uncle Feygele (2011), and What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn (2008).

Translators Yermiyau Ahron Taub and Ellen Cassedy

C.M. MAYO: Can you tell us more about Yiddish as a language, and specifically, its roots and connections with other languages, including German and Ladino?

ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Yiddish is a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet. For hundreds of years, it was the everyday vernacular spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe. While Ladino became the Spanish-inflected language of Jews in the Mediterranean region, Yiddish was the everyday language among Jews living farther north, in Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe.

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: There is an alternative theory that Yiddish is essentially a Slavic language, but most scholars believe it’s a Germanic language.

ELLEN CASSEDY: For me, Yiddish is a holy tongue. Translating Yiddish connects me to a history, an enduring cultural legacy. Yiddish is precious to me for its outsider point of view, its irony, its humor, its solidarity with the little guy, its honoring of the everyday.

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: The Yiddish language has been a crucial tool for my literary work. As a bridge to the past and an enhancement of my literary and social present, Yiddish opens a vibrant linguistic plane, full of texture, play, and reference. Yiddish is for me a place of primal connection and, for all its and my “baggage,” a source of strange comfort. Writing, reading, and translating Yiddish also allows me to learn new Yiddish words and re-learn forgotten ones.

C.M. MAYO: You write in the introduction that for Blume Lempel the “decision to write in Yiddish was a carefully considered choice.” What do you think motivated her to write for what was already a quickly shrinking readership?

ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: For Lempel, Yiddish was a portable homeland that served her well as she encountered new circumstances and new languages. Born in 1907 in a small town in Eastern Europe, she immigrated to Paris and then fled to New York with her family just before World War II. Until her death in 1999, writing in Yiddish enabled her to express her connection to those who had perished in the Holocaust – as she put it, to “speak for those who could no longer speak.”

Writing in Yiddish also afforded a kind of “privacy.” Lempel wrote about subjects considered taboo by other writers – abor—ion, rap—, erot— imaginings, even inc—st.* Would she have felt free to exercise the same artistic freedom in English? Perhaps not.

*[C.M.: Massive apologies for inserting these ridiculous dashes but if left in plain English, which I am sure that you, gentle reader, can figure out, the Google bot may, in the Byzantine wisdom of its algorithms, send this blog into SEO netherworlds.]

But if Lempel needed privacy for artistic freedom, she also wanted recognition and worked hard to get her work out to a wider audience. Her efforts paid off. Over the years, she won widespread admiration among Yiddish writers and readers and received numerous Yiddish literary prizes.

C.M. MAYO: What do you think would have been lost in these stories had Lempel written in English? This is another way of asking, what were the biggest challenges for you as translators?

ELLEN CASSEDY: I don’t put much stock in the idea that some literary qualities can be expressed only in their original language. For me, what’s important is the fluidity and freedom that Lempel herself experienced, which resulted in the extraordinary richness of her prose. I’m not sure she could have attained such heights in a language that was not part of her very being from girlhood on.

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: As we translated, we encountered surprises at every turn—in virtually every paragraph, and on every page. Lempel’s prose is so poetic and rich that we had to exercise special care to capture her unique melody.

Sometimes we had to accept uncertainty, realizing we wouldn’t be completely certain of Lempel’s meaning even if her text had been written in English. It was immensely satisfying to work with a partner, to be able to bounce ideas off each other, and to know that our interchange would strengthen the final version.

ELLEN CASSEDY: Lempel’s narrations move between past and present, often several places on the same page, from Old World to New, from fantasy to reality. Imagine the conversational matter-of-factness of a Grace Paley combined with the surreal flights of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

C.M. MAYO: Can you also talk about how it was to work together as co-translators?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Working together was a joy. Once we’d selected the stories, each of us chose our favorites and produced first drafts. Then the other one carefully went over those drafts and made suggestions.

I was brought up to pay very close attention to the wonders of the English language. Every family dinner included at least one trip to the dictionary. I brought that intense involvement with English to the translation table.

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Working together has been joyful, yes… but also humbling. One had to be open to another’s suggestions and feedback throughout the process. There was a lot of give and take, back and forth about meaning, the best turn of phrase, etc. Of course, every book, even one by a single author (and no translators), is a collaboration of some kind—with the publisher, editor, cover artist, designer, etc. But collaboration on the text— of every word of it—is much more so. I’ve learned a great deal from this process—about translation, about myself … and about Ellen!

Of course, this collaboration is still an ongoing process, as we complete interviews and embark on speaking engagements on behalf of the book. I feel so fortunate to be working with Ellen.

ELLEN CASSEDY: Back at you, dear partner!

C.M. MAYO: Do you think Lempel’s visibility as a literary artist, and her life, might have been different had she written in English?

ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Absolutely. The Yiddish literary circle after World War II was far-flung but cohesive, and she thrived within it. Yiddish publications all over the world carried her work. She received prizes in Israel, Canada, and the U.S. When she died, the Yiddish paper Forverts wrote: “Yiddish literature has lost one of its most remarkable women writers.”

Despite her success within the Yiddish literary sphere, though, she always dreamed of an English-language readership. Although a few individual stories of hers appeared in journals and anthologies, there has been no full-length collection in English until now. It’s a joy for us to help her unrealized dream come true.

C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to translate Yiddish?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Years ago, when my Jewish mother died, I decided to study Yiddish as a memorial to her and a way to sustain ties with my Jewish forebears on both sides of the Atlantic. I was also looking for a home within Jewish culture, and I hoped Yiddish language and literature would provide that home. And indeed it has!

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Yiddish was a part of the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva world in which I was raised. I studied it formally as an adult and have been engaged in Yiddish culture since the early 1990’s.

C.M. MAYO: What brought you to translate Blume Lempel?

ELLEN CASSEDY: Early on, when I told my Yiddish teacher I wanted to try my hand at translation, he went to his bookshelf and pulled out a little volume– Blume Lempel’s first collection, personally inscribed to him by the author. When I met Yermiyahu Ahron Taub in a Yiddish reading group, we decided to look into this volume. We were astounded to find truly unique writer with a dazzling lyrical style, an unparalleled compassion for her characters, a startling diversity of settings, and a daring range of subjects.

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: It didn’t take long for us to decide we had to translate these splendid stories so that they could reach the wider audience they so richly deserve.

C.M. MAYO: If you could select one short story as the most representative of her work, which one would it be, and why?

ELLEN CASSEDY: It’s hard to choose, because Lempel’s range of settings and characters is huge. She tells truths about women’s inner lives that I’ve never encountered anywhere else.

“Waiting for the Ragman” is particularly rich in its description of life in a small Eastern European hometown, including a loving description of preparation for the Sabbath.

And I have to mention the title story, “Oedipus in Brooklyn.” Lempel masterfully draws you into the story of a contemporary Jewish mother and her blind son as they move inexorably toward their doom.

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: “Her Last Dance” tells the story of a Jewish woman forced to rely on her wits and beauty to survive wartime Paris. Despite its small scale, it evokes for me the work of Irène Nemirovsky and Nella Larsen (Passing). In capturing the desperation of a woman on the edge, it reminds me of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.

“The Invented Brother” captures the poignant emotions of a young girl whose beloved older brother is swept away into revolutionary activity.

C.M. MAYO: In one of the many blurbs for this collection, Cynthia Ozick calls Blume Lempel “a brilliantly robust Yiddish-American writer. Why should Isaac Bashevis Singer and Chaim Grade monopolize this rich literary genre?”

MENKE, the complete collection
published by The Smith in 2005

Can you tell us more about some of the writers Blume Lempel would have been reading and corresponding with in Yiddish? (Did she know Menke Katz?)

ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Avrom Sutzkever, the “dean” of postwar Yiddish poetry, was an admirer, and a mentor. She was admired by other leading Yiddish writers as well, including Yonia Fain, Chaim Grade, Malka Heifetz-Tussman, Chava Rosenfarb, and Osher Jaime Schuchinski.

And yes, she did know the New York poet Menke Katz. We found several warm letters from him within her papers.

C.M. MAYO: Of those writers not writing in Yiddish, which were important influences for Lempel?

ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: She was one of a kind. When an interviewer asked which writers had influenced her, she mentioned Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and the philosophers Spinoza and Bergson, but only in passing. She didn’t feel part of any school or tendency.

The key to reading this amazing writer is to approach her work without preconceived expectations of what fiction should be. Open yourself up to the twists and turns, the possibilities. You’re in for a wild and wonderful ride.

C.M. MAYO: How do you see the future of Yiddish?

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: That’s a big question. Yiddish is still the lingua franca of various Hasidic communities in Israel and the Diaspora. One can see Yiddish signs, for example, in Monroe, N.Y., Monsey, N.Y., and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, among numerous other places. Of course, Hebrew encroaches in Israel, and English encroaches in the United States. Still, I don’t foresee Yiddish fading away in those communities any time soon. Hasidic communities believe in Yiddish as a bulwark against the encroaching “dominant” culture.

In terms of secular Yiddish culture, a small number of families are committed to raising their children in Yiddish. And there is considerable artistic and intellectual activity in the realm of Yiddish culture – panels on Yiddish at Association for Jewish Studies conferences, concerts, gatherings, and festivals dedicated to Yiddish, and releases of books and compact discs.

Translation is a particularly rich area of contemporary Yiddish culture. A recent anthology called Have I Got a Story for You: More Than a Century of Fiction from the Forward (Norton, 2016), edited by Ezra Glinter, demonstrates the work of numerous Yiddish translators active today. Of course, some would argue that that itself is a sign of demise. I don’t see it that way. Translation requires knowledge of both linguistic contexts.

Do I think all of this qualifies as a rebirth? Not exactly, but nor do I see Yiddish as dead, dying, or even endangered really.

C.M. MAYO: Have Lempel’s stories had an influence on you as a writer, and if so, how?

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: It’s hard to know if Lempel’s stories have influenced me as a writer or if I was drawn to her because of my pre-existing interests. Certainly, we both share an interest in the realms of the marginal and the “outsider,” although we might have differing perceptions of who is marginal or an outsider. We also share an interest in poetry and poetic language, and the blurring of the line between poetry and prose. I certainly consider Blume Lempel to be a kindred writerly spirit and an inspiration.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as writers and translators?

ELLEN CASSEDY: I’m currently seeking a publisher for my translation of fiction by the Yiddish writer Yenta Mash, who grew up in Eastern Europe not far from Blume Lempel. I’m excited to have won a PEN/Heim translation grant – the first ever for a Yiddish book – to support this work.

YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: A new collection of my poems is currently in the publication process. Six of the poems also have a Yiddish version, which raises all sorts of translation and design challenges.

ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: And of course we’re getting the word out about the Blume Lempel collection. It’s exciting to introduce English-language readers to these stories with their dazzling prose and their bold approach to storytelling.

Visit Ellen Cassedy at her webpage here.
Visit Yermiyahu Ahron Taub at his website here.

P.S. Philip K. Jason gives Oedipus in Brooklyn a rave review in The Washington Review of Books.

And if you’re in the Washington DC area, don’t miss the launch at Politics & Prose Bookstore:

Sunday, January 8, 1 pm
Politics & Prose Bookstore
5015 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20008
The event is free with no reservation required.
Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel
Translated by Ellen Cassedy & Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Mandel Vilar Press & Dryad Press, 2016

Q & A: Yermiyahu Ahron Taub on Prodigal Children in the House of G-d

Q & A: Nancy Peacock on The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.