Ellen Kellman

Fradel Shtok’s Yiddish poetry and prose is distinctive for its treatment of the inner sensual lives of Jewish women. Immigrating to America from the Galician shtetl of Skale at age seventeen in 1907, she published poems and short stories in several anthologies and literary journals, especially those of the literary group Di Yunge [The Young Generation]. Although she showed great promise as a poet and prose writer, she was discouraged by the unenthusiastic reception of her collection of short stories by leading critics in New York in 1919 and withdrew from the Yiddish literary scene. No collection of her poetry ever appeared. In recent decades, feminist poets and literary historians have rediscovered Shtok’s work and made it known to English-language readers through translation and critical interpretation.

Miriam Karpilove was a prolific and widely popular writer of fiction about the changing roles of Jewish women in American immigrant culture. Her publishing career in the American Yiddish press spanned five decades, and her serialized novels became staple fare in the leading Yiddish dailies. Raised in a traditional Jewish home near Minsk, Belorussia at the end of the nineteenth century, she immigrated to the United States in her teens and became one of a small handful of women who achieved success as writers of Yiddish newspaper serials. Her writing is remembered for its pioneering treatment of important contemporary issues of female socialization, gender roles and sexual mores.