Gollance, Sonia; (2017) A Dance: Fradel Shtok Reconsidered. In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies

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Abstract

Born in Gali­cia in 1890, Fradel Shtok immi­grat­ed to Amer­i­ca in 1907. She became con­nect­ed with the mod­ernist group Di yunge and won acclaim for her poems. Despite this suc­cess, her 1919 col­lec­tion of short sto­ries received mixed reviews. For years it was believed she angri­ly left Yid­dish pub­lish­ing and lat­er died in a men­tal insti­tu­tion. Recent archival dis­cov­er­ies chal­lenge the accept­ed biog­ra­phy, reveal­ing that she wrote a play man­u­script (copy­right­ed 1923) and pub­lished a sto­ry in the Forverts in 1942. Trans­la­tions of Shtok’s sto­ries about young women com­ing of age in East­ern Europe fea­ture promi­nent­ly in col­lec­tions of Yid­dish women’s writ­ing. Such schol­ar­ly endeav­ors bring atten­tion to Shtok’s life and work but gen­er­al­ly pass over sto­ries con­cern­ing male pro­tag­o­nists or an Amer­i­can set­ting — parts of her cor­pus acknowl­edged by her con­tem­po­raries. As a result, most Eng­lish-lan­guage schol­ar­ship presents only a lim­it­ed view of Shtok’s nuanced depic­tions of the secret desires of social­ly mar­gin­al figures. This arti­cle recon­sid­ers Shtok’s oeu­vre and lit­er­ary recep­tion in the con­text of my trans­la­tion of her short sto­ry ​“A tants” (A dance). Using the expe­ri­ence of a male sweat­shop work­er in New York who attends a fam­i­ly wed­ding, the sto­ry explores the dance floor as a space of nos­tal­gia, escape, and dan­ger for immi­grant Jews in New York. As I will demon­strate, Shtok’s use of dance com­pli­cates the recep­tion of her lit­er­ary oeu­vre and illu­mi­nates her com­plex inter­twin­ing of dreams and reality.

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