by Faith Jones

Meant to Be and Other Stories
by Shira Gorshman
Translated from the Yiddish by Faith Jones
Published by White Goat Press
Purchase the book here

“She was so gaunt I could see every vein through her transparent skin. She roamed Frunze for days on end. I didn’t dare say a thing. If it seemed to her that I was trying to sympathize, she’d wave me away with her thin hands, spitting out through pale, pursed lips, ‘You just don’t get it! You’re a witch.’”

In this story two families, evacuated from Russia as the Nazis move east, share a house in a Kyrgyzstani city, where their shared language and experiences of famine and loss fail spectacularly to bring them together. The Jewish refugees are as different from each other as they are from the Central Asian peoples they live among, providing no solidarity to relieve the uncertainty of their tenuous position as they await a time when they can return home.

Shira Gorshman’s stories—idealistic, angry, and tartly funny—move through the 20^th century experience of Eastern European Jews, and Jewish women in particular. From the shtetl, where poverty reigns but socialism and Zionism promise an alternative future, to the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, to a kibbutz in Palestine, to collective farming in Crimea, and to the heart of Soviet Moscow—these stories excavate both interior lives and social movements with a deft hand and a surprisingly modern voice.

Though not even well known in Yiddish literary circles, Gorshman’s writing is finally gaining notice thanks to the recent focus on recovering Yiddish women writers. Her concerns about women’s particular burdens—including rape and sexual harassment, the gendered nature of hunger, the social isolation brought by modernization, and the failure of every political system to adequately account for the undermining power of patriarchy—resonate with contemporary readers. Even those who have read widely on World War II, the Holocaust, and Jewish life in the Soviet Union will find new insights in Gorshman’s work, as it tackles experiences and tells stories not often available to English-language readers.

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Shira Gorshman (1905-2001) was an activist in left-wing movements in Lithuania, Palestine, and Crimea before she moved to Moscow with her second husband, the painter Mendl Gorshman, and turned to writing. Her stories reflect her abiding interest in creating justice and meaningful connection in a world that rewards the powerful.

Faith Jones is a librarian and translator in Vancouver, Canada. Her scholarly work on Yiddish women literary figures and cultural activists has been widely published. She co-translated The Acrobet: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin, a poetry bestseller.

Yiddish stories originally published in:
Der koyekh fun lebn (The Power of Life). Moscow: Der Emes, 1948.
33 noveln (33 Stories).Warsaw: Yidish Bukh, 1961.
Lebn un likht (Life and Light ). Moscow: Sovetski Pisatel, 1974.
Yontef in mitn vokh (Mid-Week Holiday). Moscow: Sovetski Pisatel, 1984.

This translation project was granted a Translation Fellowship by the Yiddish Book Center.