Description: 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.
Review Quotes: "To paraphrase a line from Fradl Shtok's story 'In the Village, ' a 'joyous restlessness runs riot' through these pages. Shtok's stories are charged with longing; this longing is regularly cut with a playful wryness; this wryness, in turn, is interspersed with flickering instances of raw beauty and raw pain. Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter's translation is fluid and elegant, at times leaning into a colloquial relaxedness--'That Persian-lamb cap sure made her bangs pop'--and at other junctures pulling toward the lyrical, as when one character's semi-illicit consumption of a single viburnum berry (described brilliantly as 'both good and not good') is likened to 'swallowing the clear frost, the cold sun on the snow.' From the heart-stopping music of a flute played by a handsome stranger balanced on a tightrope, to the scene of village women eating fresh bread after swimming, smelling of water, talking, and feeling 'bighearted toward the whole world, ' this collection is overflowing with moments, images, and lines that I will not soon forget. I loved reading it." --Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Sadness Is a White Bird: A Novel