Like their American sisters in the 1970s who discovered unknown women writers from the past, Jewish feminists in the 1990s recovered the untranslated stories of earlier Yiddish women writers. They especially needed to rescue the work of those from the Soviet Union where Jewish writers had been repressed. Among these repressed writers was Shira Gorshman. A dynamo, she moved from childhood in a Lithuanian shtetl, to young adulthood among socialists in Kovno, to communes in Palestine and Crimea. After taking refuge from Nazis in Kyrgyzstan, she lived in Moscow until she made Aliyah to Israel at the age 85. Like their creator, Gorshman’s characters live in different locales and survive oppressive Soviet life, and like her, they are also feisty and resourceful. Her partially autobiographical stories reveal a woman’s life behind the iron curtain: how women endure and build relationships despite hardship. Each class will consist of a short, historical lecture and discussion of two Gorshman stories from her collection Meant to Be.
((Lois Rubin - In-Person: CMU Campus - Tuesday))
