Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars

by Sandra Bark

Genres: Anthologies

Synopsis

This book is certain to appeal to the millions of Jewish women interested in Jewish literature and the writings of Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, and Grace Paley. Beautifully packaged, it is an ideal Mother's Day or Bat-Mitzvah gift. This volume contains translations of Yiddish stories from eminent scholars--including an Isaac Bashevis Singer story that has never before been published in English--and well-known tales that Jewish readers everywhere love. As bestsellers such as Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander have demonstrated, there is a strong interest in Jewish stories. Yiddish culture and music have seen a resurgence in recent years. NPR's All Things Considered aired a series of highly acclaimed documentaries about the Yiddish Radio Project and Klezmer musicians regularly play at top alternative venues.

Release date: September 3, 2007

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 370

Sample

Foreword

by Sandra Bark

What does it mean to be a Jewish woman? According to Jewish law and tradition, she is a dutiful daughter, marries the right (Jewish) man, and becomes an eishes chayil, a woman of valor. Women’s intelligence and contributions are not disputed— rather, they are directed toward “appropriate” outlets. “The wisdom of the woman builds the home,” instructed the sages. When the primary building block of the community and the nation is the family unit, this is an honor. But what happens when women want to circumvent custom and reinvent their boundaries?

Set in Europe, Russia, Israel, and the United States during the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the stories in Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars reflect the perspectives of male Yiddish writers on women and allow Yiddish women writers to define their own issues. The nineteenth century was accompanied by great social, political, and economic shifts. Young men opened their eyes to the rest of the world, and so did young women. Recognizing the unique struggles of women—and reading their stories—is integral to our appreciation of recent Jewish history.

Most of the stories in this volume are pre-Holocaust, full of images from a lifestyle that is now completely destroyed. Concerned largely with relationships, the stories center around women who reach beyond the limits imposed on them by their families, societies, and religion, yet feel bound to their communities. These heroines are wistful mothers, stalwart grandmothers, rebellious teenagers, desperate brides, and star-crossed lovers. They are women fighting to be students, students pretending to be boys, and boys who become brides. They make choices and mistakes. They take chances. They take revenge.

While women have been writing in Yiddish for four hundred years, they are sparsely present, if at all, when we envision the Jewish literary canon. Yet before modern Yiddish culture and literature began to flourish in the later nineteenth century, Yiddish was the voice of grandmothers, aunts, and daughters. While men conducted their religious and literary affairs in the holy Hebrew, women lived their lives in Yiddish, raising their children, running their businesses, and bargaining with God in that language. This is why Yiddish stories by and about women are especially appropriate—Yiddish, the mame loshen, literally, the “mother tongue,” was the language of women’s experience.

When I told my own mother about this collection, she suggested that I take the name from “Sheyn vi di levone,” the Yiddish love song whose refrain goes, “To me, you are as beautiful as the moon, as bright as all the stars in the sky.” This is the way culture is passed on—from mother to child, from generation to generation. I hope you will read this book as both an engaging piece of literature and an exciting piece of cultural history. Language and tradition tie us to our pasts and bind us to our history, as do stories. Diffusion of Jewish culture has long been the province of the women, as the sages charged, and so was the spread and development of Yiddish, the linguistic homeland of the people without a home. After all, when your mother raises you, it is her voice you will always hear in your ears and her language you will count as your first.

Introduction

by Francine Prose

Reading Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, I was reminded of a story I heard from a friend who, as a child, attended a religious Sunday school in her local Reform synagogue. Her teacher was, my friend later realized, a secret feminist, years ahead of her time (this was in the late 1950s), who was determined to do her part to challenge the tenets and assumptions of the patriarchy.

Every week, the teacher told her class, they would be studying a different biblical heroine. And so, week after week, they learned about the brave and noble deeds of Miriam, Deborah, Ruth, and Esther. But though the teacher tried valiantly to make a convincing case for the wives of the patriarchs, the list of suitable subjects was relatively brief, and they ran out of women to study within a couple of months.

“What about the other heroines?” my friend sensibly asked.

Her teacher thought for a long time. “The other heroines,” she replied at last, “were women we’ve never heard of.”

Likewise, the heroines—and heroines they truly are—of this revealing collection of Yiddish stories about Jewish women are (with the exception of a few well-known fictional characters like Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl) women we’ve never heard of. And each one certainly represents millions of real women whose lives must have resembled the brave, complicated, and difficult lives of the Jewish women—young and old, rural and urban, poor and middle-class—we encounter in these pages.

Perhaps what’s most striking about Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars is the force with which it reminds us that— not so very long ago and not so very far away—women had to struggle for even the smallest fraction of the autonomy and self-determination that we take for granted today. Set mostly in Europe, the United States, and Israel, mostly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of these fictions concern women who must fight just to entertain and express a simple opinion of their own or to exert the slightest influence on the shape of their own destinies.

Several of the stories concern the often insurmountable obstacles that young women were compelled to face if they found themselves inexplicably seized by the subversive and socially suspect desire for an education. “A girl only needs to learn how to read her prayers and sign her name,” declares the grandmother in Rachel H. Korn’s “The Sack with Pink Stripes.” In Dvora Baron’s “Kaddish,” a child must witness her grandfather’s helpless grief at not having been blessed with a son who could have said the mourner’s prayer for him after his death. The girl’s love for the old man inspires and intensifies her own heartfelt, well-intentioned, and ultimately futile desire to learn and recite the words of the prayer—a longing that cannot be fully satisfied because she has had the misfortune to be born female.

Like several of the selections included here, Helen Londynski’s “The Four-Ruble War” portrays the wily and frequently desperate survival strategies that young women adopt in order to realize their ambitions. Hoping to raise money for the tuition that will allow her to continue her studies at a private school in Warsaw, Chayele buys cheaper shoes than the ones she has been given money to purchase. In fact, the strength of her passion for learning is so intense that she is driven to steal money from her own father. And Londynski encourages us to see these petty crimes as the rash but ultimately justified means to a worthy and justifiable end.

Even when they succeed in overcoming the prejudice against educating women, these heroines are often tormented by guilt and remorse over what they have left behind and lost. The narrator of Yente Serdatzky’s “Rosh Hashanah”—a self-described “freethinker” who has abandoned the shtetl for the city—longs for the “holy, poetic stillness” of the village where she spent her youth and is devastated when she looks in the mirror and notices that her face resembles that of the grandfather she adores. Women who have successfully broken away and established autonomous lives must face new difficulties and challenges. For example, the three beautiful emancipated sisters who run the lodging establishment at the center of “In the Boardinghouse” inspire fervid gossip, rumor, speculation, and love among the men with whom they come in contact, men who simply cannot believe that the sisters are not “keeping their husbands here in Berlin, but hidden away.”

Stories about girls who defy the strictures of the adult world around them seem like accounts of small, significant triumphs—until we happen to compare them to stories about male protagonists in more or less comparable circumstances. The fourteen-year-old narrator of Rochel Faygenberg’s “My First Readers” scores a personal victory by ignoring her grand-mother’s anxious warnings against wandering around a city that suggests Odessa and by drafting letters for a servant and a wet nurse to send to their fiancés. But when we compare the girl’s experience of the city with that of her male counterpart in a work such as Isaac Babel’s “My First Fee”—a tale about a boy whose passion for a prostitute inspires him to invent his first piece of imaginative fiction—the girl’s bid for independence seems suddenly tame, and indeed the whole story begins to sound as if it were written with the monitory grandmother looking over the author’s shoulder.

Considering the determination with which the parents and grandparents in these fictions resist their daughters’ educational aspirations, it’s no surprise that the girls’ romantic longings and their efforts to determine whom they will love and marry are consistently and fiercely overlooked and ignored. Love, we soon come to understand, too often provides the occasion for the misuses and abuse of power. Matches and betrothals reveal the hidden truths about these women’s lives—namely, that they are little more than property to be traded, bargained for, and disposed of at whim or for reasons of convenience, social advancement, communal pressure, tradition, and superstition—and with little or no regard for the young women’s wishes.

The stories are filled with secret passions and thwarted love affairs, with engagements broken by parental fiat, and with innocent lives ruined as a consequence. In “The Sack with Pink Stripes,” the narrator discovers that her mother has never gotten over the loss of her first love—a handsome boy whom she was forbidden to wed after his sister scandalized the community by converting and marrying a blacksmith. The ironic, delicate sexual comedy of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” is set in motion when Hadass’s parents prevent her from marrying Avigdor—and consequently throw her into the arms of the cross-dressing Yentl, whom they believe to be a man. Read in the context of this anthology, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” seems even more delightful and meaningful than we may have remembered. For the sense of these women’s lives that Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars provides makes us realize that Yentl would have had very cogent, very strong reasons—apart from her more inchoate and irrational psycho-sexual urges and promptings—for wanting to lead the life of a man instead of the much more limited, restricted destiny of a woman.

Many of the stories function as cautionary tales—warnings about what happens when a woman refuses to follow, or, alternately, when she follows too closely, the rules and conventions that so narrowly define the manner in which a woman is supposed to behave. The eponymous heroine of I. L. Peretz’s “Bryna’s Mendl” is one of several in the book—among them, the milkman Tevye’s daughter, the title character in Sholom Aleichem’s “Hodel”—who are considerably more resourceful, more capable, smarter, and quicker to figure out the complex ways of the world than the men around them. Married to a dim and barely competent husband, Bryna wants nothing more than to be “his footstool in Paradise. She pampered him and stuffed him with food. She worked like a donkey to support him, to shoe and clothe him and their five children—three girls and two boys.” Dreaming of England, which in his mind is a sort of Promised Land, Mendl fails to notice that Bryna is working—and literally starving herself—to death so that he will be properly cosseted and well fed, until at last she collapses and dies. “Bryna, who had attracted no notice in life, was barely visible on her deathbed. She was so thin!”

What’s interesting about Esther Singer Kreitman’s “A Satin Coat”—yet another story about underappreciated female competence and the perils of forcing, or attempting to force, a woman to marry against her will—is that it examines not only the bonds and restrictions imposed by gender, but also the prejudices and presuppositions associated with money and social class. Here, all of Yidl Glisker’s misguided efforts to gentrify his sturdy peasant family—or at least to create the appearance of gentrification—pale before the intensity of his daughter’s refusal to marry the suitor her father has chosen, “a gentle and silken young man from a fine family.”

In a number of stories, including Sholom Aleichem’s “Hodel,” women are drawn to budding young Communists whose ideology offers, or appears to offer, a promise of something more closely approximating sexual equality. Celia Dropkin’s “At the Rich Relatives” tracks the hopes and disappointments of a young girl whose discomfort over her allegedly inferior social and economic standing is alleviated by a charged flirtation with her attractive and politically engaged cousin—until circumstances remind her that despite her cousin’s noble ideas about the role of women in the revolution and the eventual abolition of private property and class, the power balance is still tipped heavily in favor of men like her rich and privileged uncle. Likewise, the heroine of “Rosh Hashanah” discovers, to her chagrin, that all her modern, urbanized notions about politics and religion cannot match the emotional sway that her memories of her traditional family and her village home still exert over her heart and soul.

Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars guides us through the life cycle of these perfectly ordinary and utterly exceptional women, from the child at the center of “Kaddish” to the young women discovering first love and the dawning of eroticism in Celia Dropkin’s “Bella Fell in Love” and David Bergelson’s “Spring,” to the elderly aunt whose passing in Blume Lempel’s “The Death of My Aunt” forces her surviving niece to confront issues of love and loyalty, of promises broken and kept, of what women like the narrator’s aunt have brought with them from the old country to the New World.

Two of the volume’s most intriguing stories concern old age. In Shira Gorshman’s “Bubbe Malke,” rage and righteousness inspire an elderly midwife to commit an amazing act of courage, violence, and revenge. In Dvora Baron’s “Bubbe Henya,” a mysterious old woman who has acquired a reputation for almost superhuman generosity and sympathy proves that her powers are far more astonishing than anyone could have imagined. The characters and actions of the two old women could not possibly be more different, yet what they have in common is power, bravery, autonomy, independence, and resourcefulness—in short, all the qualities that the younger women in these stories have been working so hard to obtain.

Reading “Bubbe Malke” and “Bubbe Henya” makes us feel that these women’s struggles were not in vain, that the obstacles they overcame, the roadblocks they crashed through or circumvented, and the surrenders or defeats they were forced to endure were also sources of wisdom and strength—a difficult school in which they learned the lessons that enabled them to become the heroines they were destined to be. Reading Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars makes us glad that our own lives are so different from the much more circumscribed fates of the women we are reading about. At the same time, the book makes us grateful to these heroines for having had the courage and resolve to help prepare the way for us to insist upon—and even to take for granted—the ordinary, everyday, absolutely essential freedoms that we enjoy today.

KADDISH

Dvora Baron

Translated by Naomi Seidman with Chana Kronfeld

My grandmother bore my grandfather ten gifts—ten children, but, alas, not a single son. They say that every time a girl was born, he would lift his thoughtful-pious eyes to heaven and sigh deeply:

It seems, Father, that you don’t consider me worthy of a son, a son who could say kaddish for me when I pass on. . . .

And at nightfall, he would sit down listlessly at the table, open the big Talmud, and sadly, very softly and sadly, sing to himself. Somewhere in a far-off corner between the wall and the partition, my grandmother would sit and listen to the Talmud chant and cry in silence.

Later, after my grandmother had died and my grandfather took me in, a tiny orphan, to feed, I would often hear this very same mournful chant.

Late, very late at night, when a thick, mute, darkness would press up against our little window from outside, my grandfather would light the lamp and sit down at his Talmud. All is quiet now, and melancholy. Only occasionally, from some distant field, comes a soft Hoo, hoo, hoo.

That was the wind, chasing its tail somewhere out there in the darkness, stumbling over naked fields, and sobbing softly.

And inside the house, mute, terror-black shadows would wrap my grandfather in dark shrouds, veiling his clouded-gray face, his high forehead, his deep-set, sad eyes:

Ay, ay, Father, ay, ay, sweet Father.

And it was hard to know, at times like these, whether he was thinking about himself, about his lonesome life, and crying, dry-eyed, or whether he was really absorbed in the words he was chanting.

Ay, ay, Father dear...

“Zeyde.”

And running through the shadows with my tremulous steps, I would sneak onto his knee.

“I want to listen to you learn.”

And my little body would be set loose between his cold, thin hands, which stroked and hugged me, clutching me close, close to his heart:

“Ach, Rivele, Rivele—if only you were a boy . . .” And a strange look would come over his face and his eyes would become dejected and thoughtful.

What a beard he had, my grandfather, white all over.

I remember the Sabbath days, the winter Sabbaths in my grandfather’s house. Outside—a disheveled, lumbering sky over the congealed, dead earth. It’s quiet and dismal. Every now and then a flock of black crows flies by, hurls a few curses into the air, and then disappears, and again it’s quiet.

But now the winter sky is turning darker, a heavy, angry dusk creeps slowly and icily through the little window, enveloping in black the damp walls, the low ceiling, the table with its white tablecloth, even Grandfather’s white beard.

Dark.

And soon I hear Grandfather rise from his place, scrape together the challah crumbs from the late afternoon Sabbath meal, wrap a thick scarf around his neck, and leave.

With wide-open eyes and beating heart I stay where I am, enveloped in shadow. I listen: everything around is silent. Only from farther away, from the top of the hill, can a monotonous ringing be heard.

Clang-clang-clang! . . . clang-clang-clang!

The church bells are proclaiming that our holy Sabbath is passing away, and now it’s their holy day, the uphill folk’s.

Clang-clang-clang!

Slowly. Every peal distinct. And the wind rocks, rocks and sways:

“Ay-ay-ay... ay-ay-ay...”

That was exactly how my mother howled the night her two sons died on her.

But now a powerful ray of light suddenly pierces the little window, covers the table, scatters into many golden threads, and stabs my eyes: the old solid-walled synagogue, which towers over the hovels around its courtyard like a giant among midgets, watches me with seven fiery eyes—its lit windows. There, in the study hall, they’re praying the evening service. The winter hats sway, the men spit out the closing prayer, wish each other “a good week.”

Grandfather comes in, lights two thin candles, pours himself a little glass of havdalah wine, and looks toward the door. Soon an ugly little kid walks in—he’s the one who’s going to be drinking that wine. He gives me a look with his small, devious eyes, waits for my grandfather to look away, and then sticks out his tongue. If it weren’t for Grandfather, I’m sure that loathsome boy with his grubby paws would just stick his fist under my nose: “Here, take this.”

I feel the blood rising to my head: You rotten snot-nose!

“Zeyde,” I say, “Zeyde, I’ll drink the wine today.”

He shakes his head.

“Child, child—the havdalah wine? You forget, you’re a girl. . . . ”

Child, child... These words ring so bare, so strange. Two deep, deep creases spread across his high, pale brow, his milk-clouded eyes open wider and wider. Now all I can see are two gaping holes; they look off toward the corner between the window and partition.

“Beyla, Beyla, what did you do? You couldn’t have borne me a kaddish, Beyla, huh...?”

And he stretches out a palsied hand, his right hand, the fingers long, pale, the nails sharp and cold.

“Beyla, oh, Beyla.”

And he bursts into tears. I can see his eyebrows trembling now, the tears rolling down.

“Zeyde . . .” I lift my head.

Pacified-saddened now, he sits over the open Talmud, swaying and chanting softly.

He is learning—my soul fills to the brim with happiness. Suddenly, I remember that somewhere in one of the shacks at the very bottom of the hill lives an old Jewish woman, an ancient one. For five kopecks a week she’ll teach anyone who asks how to read Hebrew.

“Five kopecks a week,” I say to myself, and I feel a warm flow seep slowly into my heart and gently, silently, caress it. . . .

So one beautiful summer Sabbath I go over to Grandfather with tremendous steps and raise my two eyes—full of quiet, holy joy—to his.

“Want to test me, Zeyde?”

Grandfather lifts his head from the Talmud and brushes his brow with his hand. I see an eyelid tremble as he looks at me:

“Child.”

“Zeyde,” I blurt out, and feel as if my heart were about to burst in my chest. “Zeyde, test me.”

He goes to the bookshelf, takes out a prayer book, opens it, and sets it before me. I lower my eyes and look into it.

Yisgadal veyiskadash shemey raba . . . the kaddish. A sweet shudder runs through my entire body. I push the prayer book away with both hands, raise my head, and piously close my eyes.

“Yisgadal veyiskadash shemey raba.”

And the words flow from my lips, they pour out of me into the air so mildly, so sadly...I feel my face flush, break out in a heavy sweat, my heart beats and beats, and I keep reciting. . . .

And suddenly, Grandfather snatches me in both arms, lifts me up on high, to the ceiling, and rising and soaring himself, he carries the two of us floating through the house, rocking me and tossing me into the air and adorning me with psalms of praise:

“Holy Sabbath, holy Sabbath, holy Sabbath.”

Purplish red are his lips, his high forehead—pure white. His long beard flies in all directions, quivering, and among the strands—two large teardrops shimmer and tremble now like a pair of diamonds.

Just a few days later I’m sitting on a big rock outside the synagogue wall with my head bowed—a congealed sorrow in my heart, two warm tears in my eyes. Over there, in our little house, a single memorial candle is burning. I can’t forget that for a minute. Somewhere on the dirt floor a bundle of trampled straw has been strewn; scraps of white linen—remnants of Grandfather’s shroud; on the door—a lock, a black, round lock... But what do I care? If only I had a black dress, an entirely black dress, I would look more like a boy, a lot more— this, it turns out, is the thought that’s spinning in my brain.

Around me women are gathering, wagging their heads. “So what do you suppose will happen to the orphan girl now?”

One of them even strokes my hair. “Would you like a little bun, maybe?”

A band of schoolboys shows up, looking at me with fascinated pity, and I announce to them very earnestly: “I’m not afraid of you.”

I jump up from my place and follow them.

“Where are you going?” they ask.

“I’m going to the study hall,” I say, and at once feel both my knees start shaking. “I’m going to say kaddish.”

“She’s going to say kaddish,” they snort, and an acrid, stuffy whiff of boy-sweat sears my nostrils. There are men all around me, blocking my way to the lectern, pushing me back—out—out to the entry hall. But from above, from the Holy Ark, two thoughtful-pious eyes look down at me:

“Child, child...,” so lonesome, so beseeching. “Child, child...,” and only I see the light of the memorial candle by the lectern overflow into a burning ocean, engulfing me on all sides. My breath catches and sticks in my throat.

And when I open my eyes I find myself lying with my head against the hard rock in the synagogue yard and around me, like an angry stepmother, the dark, quiet night. There, on the door to our little house, hangs a round black lock. I haven’t forgotten that, and a great fear grips my soul. I lower my face to the damp earth and burst into tears, first softly with dry eyes, and then louder and louder.

Somewhere high up under the synagogue eaves a bird awakens, flutters its wings, and listens with dread.

DVORA BARON was born in a small town in Lithuania in 1887. Her father was a rabbi, and unlike most of his contemporaries, not only was he interested in educating his daughter in typical women’s subjects, but he allowed her to attend the classes he taught the boys of the town (she sat behind a partition in the synagogue). She arrived on the literary scene in 1902, writing mostly in Hebrew—an instant marvel because she was female and was only fourteen years old, which was unheard of among Eastern European Hebrew writers at that time. She immigrated to Palestine in 1910. The first modern Hebrew woman writer, her stories focus on the shtetl and women’s experiences in Jewish Eastern Europe. She died in 1956 in her apartment in Tel Aviv, having spent the previous thirty-three years as a shut-in and the last twenty years of her life completely bedridden. The stories reprinted in this collection are from her earlier Yiddish works.

THE SACK WITH PINK STRIPES

Rachel H. Korn

Translated by Seymour Levitan

It was a fairly long sack made of pink-striped linen, the kind of material that we called gradl and used for quilt covers and pillowcases. It was probably made out of a bit left over from my mother’s trousseau. In it there was a “treasure”— various-colored balls of silk and cotton for knitting and stitching, pieces of violet canvas with started patterns of flowers and birds in cross-stitch, patterns that were never finished. Besides these, there were pieces of silk, velvet, brocade, and plain cotton print and percale, all left from my momma’s trousseau and returned by the honest seamstresses in case it was necessary to fix a rip, sew on a patch, or widen a dress at the waist. As I remember, these remainders were never used because all these brocaded silk dresses intended for wear in the city hung in the wardrobe and were only removed to be aired out once a year just before Pesach. The dresses with the long trains would have been a fine sight in the mud of Fidilske.

And then it became our custom—when we had clothes made for us, any pieces of material left over went into the secret depths of the sack with pink stripes. My greatest dream was to get the most colorful pieces of silk and velvet from those secret depths and sew dresses for my dolls out of them. But I didn’t dare touch the sack, which was at the very bottom of the big chest in the bedroom all the way over under the window. Very deep under the shimmering “treasure” lay a bundle of letters from my mother’s first betrothed. While she was searching for the right ball of thread, they would rustle under her fingers like dry November leaves.

All week I waited impatiently for Sunday afternoon. On Sunday afternoon, the hired farmhands slept in their fresh linen shirts—in the wintertime on the wide ovens and in summertime under the trees on the warm grass. Both summer and winter, the servants would be down in the village at their parents’ houses and the cowherds would be busy with the cattle.

The c. . .