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WORK TITLE: Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories
WORK NOTES: trans by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1907-1999
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lempel-blume * http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/oedipus-in-brooklyn-and-other-stories * http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/heft-notebook/bold-intimate-writing-blume-lempel
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1907, in Khorostkov, Galicia (now Ukraine); daughter of Abraham and Pesha Pfeffer; married Lemel Lempel; children: Paul, Yolanda, Steven; immigrated to New York, NY, 1939; died October 20, 1999, in Long Beach, NY.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:I.J. Segal Prize for Yiddish Literature, 1981, for A Rege fun Emes; Atran Award, 1985; Zhitlowsky Prize, 1989.
WRITINGS
Contributor to Der Tog; also the author of Tsvishn Tsvey Veltn.
SIDELIGHTS
Blume Lempel was a writer. Born in 1907 in the Galician city of Khorostkov to a Jewish family that believed she did not need to pursue a formal education as a girl, she fled Europe as the Nazis accumulated power in Germany. Lempel immigrated to New York City in 1939 with her husband and children and studied at the New School. She had previously been discouraged by her brother to write as she did not have a proper education; she destroyed much of her early work as a result. However, she eventually became more comfortable with her stories, writing largely about American life, although in Yiddish. She would write after her husband left the house to work and kept her writings mostly to herself, though some of it was published in Yiddish newspapers. She died in 1999 at her home in Long Beach, New York.
Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub’s translation of Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn & Other Stories was published in 2016. Lempel wrote about topics that were widely considered taboo in both English and Yiddish while employing stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques. Her themes included abortion, incest, and female desire. Several of the stories were also inspired from the events of the Holocaust that she had previously fled, resulting in a number of dark stories.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor found that “with shrewdness, wit, and lyricism, Lempel gives voice to the women, the aging, the ill, and others who, from the margins of modern society, have had trouble making themselves heard.” A contributor to the Yiddish Book Center Web site noticed that the stories included in this collection, “all of which were originally published in the 1980s—cover such modern topics as feminism and the erotic lives of women. One story is set in a clinic where a young woman is having an abortion; in another, a widow ventures ambivalently back into the dating pool. Other stories reach back in time and across continents. Often they contain elements of a dream world, though they remain grounded by Lempel’s down-to-earth style.”
Reviewing the collection on the Jewish Book Council Web site, Jessica Kirzane remarked that “the stories are literarily thick, referencing Ibsen, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Greek mythology, and the Bible, even as they are documentarily unyielding in their simple, jarring matter-of-fact presentation of details of violence and pain.” Kirzane additionally mentioned that “ultimately, the collection leaves the reader with this sense of questioning, of searching for a way forward through overwhelming darkness and pain which can be somehow redeemed through the act of writing.” In a review in Foreword Reviews, Michelle Anne Schingler claimed that “Lempel’s lines work to make ravaged land flourish again, and what flowers forth is both lovely and heartbreaking. These are stories that deserve a cherished place in the canon of Jewish literature.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of Oedipus in Brooklyn & Other Stories.
ONLINE
Foreword Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (November 4, 2016), review of Oedipus in Brooklyn & Other Stories.
Jewish Book Council Web site, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (May 29, 2017), review of Oedipus in Brooklyn & Other Stories.
Jewish Women’s Archive Web site, https://jwa.org/ (July 13, 2017), Troim Katz Handler, author profile.
Yiddish Book Center Web site, http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/ (May 29, 2017), review of Oedipus in Brooklyn & Other Stories.*
Blume Lempel: Born in Galicia in 1909, with the rise of Nazism, Lempel emigrated to New York in 1939. Although writing in Yiddish,the settings of her short stories were largely American. She continued to write and publish well into her 90s.Until now her work has remained mostly uncollected and untranslated.
Blume Lempel
1907 – 1999
by Troim Katz Handler
Blume Lempel was a master of stream-of-consciousness, flashback, free association and eroticism—all rare in Yiddish literature. Her modern short-story style was appropriate to her themes, which were often daring: incest—Oedipus in Brooklyn (1981), rape—Aleyn in Eynem (Alone Together, 1989) and the ambivalent attraction of one woman to another (Correspondents, 1992).
Although she also wrote personalized Holocaust stories, many of her settings were very American. She blended feelings about the songs of Frank Sinatra with thoughts of a lover, her sick mother, her stepmother, and other memories glimpsed as if in a cracked mirror (“Gezangen nit Derzungen”; Songs One Has Not Finished Singing). She said her modern style developed subconsciously. “I feel I do not borrow from anyone.”
Recognition came slowly. Her first short story was published under the pseudonym of Rokhl Halpern in the daily Yiddish newspaper Der Tog in 1943. Her novel, Tsvishn Tsvey Veltn (Between Two Worlds), was serialized in the Morgn Frayhayt in 1947, yet mention of her work was omitted from the eight-volume Lexicon of New Yiddish Literature, published by the Alveltlekher Yidisher Kultur-Kongres in 1957; she was finally included in the supplement published in 1986. She wrote only in Yiddish and received the Atran award (1985), the I. J. Segal Prize for Yiddish Literature (Montreal) for her book, A Rege fun Emes (A Moment of Truth, 1981) and the Zhitlowsky prize (1989).
Her short stories were sought after by editors of periodicals such as Di Goldene Keyt, Di Tsukunft and Yiddishe Kultur and were translated into English in Bridges, Midstream and the book Found Treasures. A very modest person, Lempel thought people must be talking about someone else when she heard her work being praised. In a Yiddish interview taped in her home in Long Beach, New York, in 1992, she stated that she could have published more than two books but shied away from the business side of writing. Her books are collections of some of her short stories: A Rege fun Emes and Balade fun a Kholem (Ballad of a Dream, 1986).
Lempel was born in Khorostkov, Ukraine (104 km N of Chernivtsi [Chernovitz]) to Abraham and Pesha Pfeffer. Her mother died when she was twelve and her father, a kosher butcher, remarried. Though he provided a fine education for his son, he believed a girl needed to know nothing more than how to sew on a patch and cook. As a result, she attended a heder for girls and a Hebrew folkshul briefly as a child and was later tutored by a man whose only expertise was in German. She had no systematic education but was kept at home to look after the cows. She was on her way to Palestine in 1929 to live out her Zionist yearnings when she stopped off in Paris to visit her brother, Yisroel, six years her senior. He had fled there because he had been hunted as a communist in Galicia. She recalled her childhood memories of soldiers piercing her bed with bayonets as they searched for him.
In Paris, where she remained for nine years, she attended night school, worked illegally in a pocket-book factory, married Lemel Lempel, a furrier who died in 1985, and bore her son Paul in 1935 and her daughter Yolanda in 1937. She started to write, but was discouraged by her brother, who told her that only an educated person could write. In fact, she had so little faith in her ability to write that she destroyed all her work. (Her brother was killed by the Germans after she was safe in the U.S.)
In 1939 the Lempels moved to New York where her son Steven was born in 1945 and where she attended classes at the New School for six years. Her husband’s nephew, Michael Klahr, joined the family after World War II; all three boys celebrated bar mitzvah.
Lempel read widely and preferred the work of I. L. Peretz to that of Shalom Aleichem. She retained her ability to speak French and in the course of an interview spoke at length in French to her nephew Robert, who was telephoning from Paris. Once in the U.S., she again attempted to write, having been stirred by news of the Holocaust. She had no literary encouragement or environment, but would retreat to her writing after her husband left for work at his fur business in New York. In June 1992, when Yiddishist Troim Katz Handler, accompanied by four members of a New York City Leyenkrayz (Yiddish reading circle), visited her at Long Beach, where Lempel had lived since 1950, Lempel said it was the first time she had been interviewed. Her work remains mostly uncollected and untranslated. Writing made her feel free. She rewrote and edited her own work extensively and never began writing without dictionaries.
Critic Alexander Shpiglblat wrote of her, “Her prose always burrowed into the depths of the soul, pushed aside veils, and revealed that which was hidden.”
Blume Lempel died in her Long Beach home on October 20, 1999.
Bibliography
Taped Yiddish interview with Blume Lempel, Long Beach, New York, 1992; Interviews with sons Paul and Steven, 2003, by telephone; Phillips, Aliza. Obituary in English Forward, Oct. 29, 1999; Schaechter, Sore-Rokhl. Obituary in Yiddish Forverts, Nov. 5, 1999; Leksikon fun der Nayer Yidisher Literatur, supplementary volume, 1986; Bauman, Mordecai. “Blume Lempel, di Shrayberin un der Mentsh.” Yiddish Forverts, December 3, 1999; “Ikh Bin ...” Yiddish biographical notes, Yiddishe Kultur, November 1989.
More on: World War II, Zionism, Yiddish, Fiction
Blume Lempel, Ellen Cassedy, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub: OEDIPUS IN BROOKLYN AND OTHER STORIES
(Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Blume Lempel, Ellen Cassedy, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub OEDIPUS IN BROOKLYN AND OTHER STORIES Mandel Vilar Press/Dryad Press (Adult Fiction) 26.95 11, 15 ISBN: 078-1-942134-25-1
A collection of stories by an accomplished Yiddish writer now appears in English for the first time.These stories are a remarkable achievement. This volume combines the two books of stories Lempel (1907-1999) published during her lifetime; much of her work appeared in Yiddish newspapers and remains uncollected. Lempel described female desire, abortion, and incest, among other things, at a time when very few other writers were willing to take on such subjects. She did so with modernist acuity, making use of stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques, with a poet’s eye for sharp, unsettling images. In “The Death of My Aunt,” the narrator, after learning of her aunt’s death, hangs up the telephone and looks out the window. It’s nighttime, and she sees “that the bare branches of my tree were filled with keening women wrapped in black shawls.” Her grief becomes literal, external. In “Images on a Blank Canvas,” which describes another death, she writes: “Inside my head, black crows caw loudly around the dead body,” an image that, as in many of her stories, blurs the line between the real and the unreal. That same narrator distinguishes herself from those people who “exchange information they have observed with their own eyes. I,” she tells us, “am trying to see the invisible. I don’t trust the eye that relies on facts.” This is as precise a statement of poetics as any other and speaks well to Lempel’s individual style. Unfortunately, Lempel also has a propensity for the sentimental, and many of the stories that begin with wry honesty are resolved with what feels like forced closure. She’s prone to overwriting, to grandiloquent passages more baroque than sonorous. Still, the pleasures of Lempel’s insight outweigh these stylistic proclivities. With shrewdness, wit, and lyricism, Lempel gives voice to the women, the aging, the ill, and others who, from the margins of modern society, have had trouble making themselves heard.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Blume Lempel, Ellen Cassedy, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub: OEDIPUS IN BROOKLYN AND OTHER STORIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463215958&it=r&asid=56de5e93a909d8a5366655560ec877f4. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463215958
The Bold, Intimate Writing of Blume Lempel
Language, Literature & Culture
Heft (Notebook)
As a child, Ellen Cassedy picked up just a little bit of Yiddish from her mother, who, she says, “sprinkled her conversation with Yiddish words now and then, sort of as a spice.” But she also picked up a deep appreciation of the role Yiddish played in Jewish culture.
“Yiddish was the language that activists on both sides of the Atlantic used to rouse the masses,” Cassedy says. It was also the language of the marketplace and the home, which resonated with Cassedy, who majored in women’s history in college and has always been interested in what she calls “history from the bottom up, honoring the everyday lives, the ordinary lives.”
After her mother died, Cassedy says, “I came up with this idea of studying Yiddish as a memorial to her.” She’s since gone on to become an accomplished translator of Yiddish works into English: this year, Cassedy won a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant—the first time the award has been given to a translator of Yiddish—for On the Landing: Selected Stories by Yenta Mash, which she worked on while a Yiddish Book Center translation fellow in 2015. This fall, Mandel Vilar Press published Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories, a collection of works by the twentieth-century Yiddish writer Blume Lempel that Cassedy and her colleague Yermiyahu Ahron Taub translated into English for the first time. Cassedy and Taub won a 2012 Translation Prize from the Yiddish Book Center for that work.
Cassedy happened upon Lempel’s writing by chance: years ago, she told her then Yiddish professor, translator Max Rosenfeld, that she was interested in trying her hand at translation, and he pulled off his shelf Lempel’s 1981 story collection A rege fun emes (A Moment of Truth), inscribed to him by the author. Cassedy translated one story from the collection—“The Death of My Aunt,” which was published in Pakn Treger. Then the book “sort of sat around for some years,” she admits, until she met Yiddish scholar David Roskies at a party. When the conversation turned to Lempel, Roskies encouraged Cassedy to continue with her translations of Lempel’s work; doing so, he told her, “would be a gift to Yiddish literature.”
“She’s a unique writer,” Cassedy says of Lempel, who began writing stories, always in Yiddish, in the 1940s and continued until shortly before her death in 1999. While much of Yiddish literature in translation harkens back to the Old World, Cassedy notes, Lempel’s work is often decidedly of the moment. The stories in Oedipus in Brooklyn—all of which were originally published in the 1980s—cover such modern topics as feminism and the erotic lives of women. One story is set in a clinic where a young woman is having an abortion; in another, a widow ventures ambivalently back into the dating pool. Other stories reach back in time and across continents. Often they contain elements of a dream world, though they remain grounded by Lempel’s down-to-earth style. Cassedy describes the effect as “Grace Paley mixed with Gabriel García Márquez.”
“She takes you, very matter-of-factly, into the experience of women, their inner and outer lives, in a very immediate way,” Cassedy notes—a marked contrast to the male modern Yiddish writers whom readers are more likely to have encountered.
Lempel was born in Galicia in 1907 and, as a young woman, lived for a time in Paris. In 1939 she fled with her husband and children to New York, where she began writing. A number of relatives who’d stayed in Europe died in the Holocaust, sending Lempel into a deep depression that brought her writing to a halt until another writer friend urged her to process her feelings through her work. Some of her stories imagine what life was like during the Holocaust, while others address “the guilt and the sadness of survivors.”
As she and Taub translated Lempel’s work, Cassedy says, “We came to feel very close to her. Although she was very private as person, she’s very intimate as a writer, and she takes you places that most writers don’t.” The translators speculate that Lempel’s decision to write exclusively in Yiddish into the late twentieth century perhaps enabled her to take risks in her writing; as the Yiddish literary world became smaller and smaller, Cassedy says, “Yiddish gave her a kind of freedom to express what she wanted to express, a kind of privacy.”
—Maureen Turner
Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories
Blume Lempel; Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, trans.
8
Mandel Vilar Press / Dryad Press 2016
240 Pages $16.95
ISBN: 978-1942134213
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Review by Jessica Kirzane
Oedipus in Brooklyn is a varied and rich collection of short stories and personal essays by Blume Lempel (1907 – 1999), masterfully translated from Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub. Lempel, whose work was widely published in Yiddish journals, immigrated to New York when Hitler rose to power, and her writing reflects the trauma of witnessing, from a distance, the devastation of the world she left behind.
The collection combines works from the two books of stories that Lempel published during her lifetime. The pieces, set in Galicia, France, and America, offer a wide array of characters and situations, but share in the intimate portrayal of the emotional and psychological experience of knowing that human beings are capable of horrifying acts of violence, and trying to live with that knowledge. Some stories deal more directly with her experience and preoccupations. Others are about the culture of her American surroundings, but harness these new settings to express her primary concerns—a female voice, disempowerment, memory of trauma, emotional survival over human cruelty, faith and doubt.
Lempel brings together sharp and unexpected images in ways that make the internal and the external, the past and the present, seem to converge and speak through one another toward some greater truth about suffering and longing. The stories move not only through plot arcs but also, and perhaps more significantly, through waves of emotion: grief, horror, acceptance, longing, that are conquered through the act of storytelling. The stories seem to bear the privacy of intimate thought that the author is hesitant to share with the world, and a sense of an urgent mission to make the most private experiences known, so that writing and reading become acts of survival in the midst of the unspeakable, the inexpressible.
Lempel’s writing gives a woman’s voice to controversial topics such as abortion, incest, divorce, and rape. But perhaps more strikingly, her work gives voice to women’s internal thoughts and experiences in moments in which they appear to have surrendered selfhood. The women in her stories have mental autonomy even when their bodies have become mere objects of male desire and abuse. Their thoughts are not necessarily empowering, rather they draw the reader in to the experience of being disempowered. In “Images on a Black Canvas,” for instance, Zusye, who was repeatedly sexually abused in exchange for life-saving protection during the Holocaust, experiences physical and psychological consequences of her abuse, devastatingly punishing herself with self-torment for her own survival and her own victimhood. In “The Debt,” a woman prone on an operating table, undergoing an abortion, takes in her surroundings and feels the sharp pain of the operation as she reflects on the desperation that brought her to this moment, and the fragment of hope that her life could be different. In several cases, the stories center on descriptions of women who make themselves passive to needy men’s desires – a mother who gives in to her blind son’s sexual desire; a girl who silently allows her adopted brother, a Holocaust survivor, to touch her naked body; a vibrant, beautiful young woman who out of pity for a tubercular neighbor surrenders herself to his desirous arms. Each of these women experience a burden of guilt that seems to require them to surrender their own bodies to assuage male suffering through female submissiveness.
The stories are literarily thick, referencing Ibsen, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Greek mythology and the Bible, even as they are documentarily unyielding in their simple, jarring matter-of-fact presentation of details of violence and pain. And, even in their representation of victimhood, abuse, suicide, and suffering, they are surprisingly hopeful, imbued with a sense of mission, a hope for survival when survival itself is so doubtable. As Lempel writes in her story “Even the Heavens Tell Lies,” “I’m seeking the faith that I’ve lost, a way out of chaos, a place where my broken self can put down roots.” Ultimately, the collection leaves the reader with this sense of questioning, of searching for a way forward through overwhelming darkness and pain which can be somehow redeemed through the act of writing.
Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories
Reviewed by Michelle Anne Schingler
November 4, 2016
These stories deserve a cherished place in the canon of Jewish literature.
Oedipus in Brooklyn gathers stories and personal essays from Blume Lempel, a Yiddish-speaking refugee who escaped the Holocaust in America but who never stopped writing about its impact upon her family and community. Stories throughout the collection are searing, both defiantly vibrant and achingly brutal, and cover topics from madness to beginning again, always with masterful attention to detail.
Stories trade between the real and the imagined. In one, a woman survives the war only to experience a total psychological break, and is haunted by the memory of the brutal villager who raped her as she hid; a heart-wrenching tribute to the author’s friend produces similar details. Lempel says Kaddish for the departed, either overtly in the course of relaying memories, or in fictionalized accounts of lives taken.
Lines strain to catch elusive moments: the light as it falls across a Pesach table; magical prisms in a distant field. Mothers reach out to children broken or departed; survivors seek revenge. Those who are left carry scars, either directly inflicted or as the result of broken bonds. Lempel’s language is poetic throughout, a gorgeous tribute to human desires and potential, even though individual works express ambivalence about the power of language, particularly at resurrecting the departed.
In the wake of tragedies, from the Holocaust to family disasters, chasms open up between characters, all of whom ache for intimacy that seems unattainable. Touch is both a balm and a thing that burns in many stories—or is sometimes both at once; sex is a recurring craving in these tales, but one never sated, and hunger, which manifests itself across settings, is similarly never satisfied.
From Italy to Brooklyn, Lempel’s characters prove incapable of outrunning the past. They try—but memories abandoned “like a stack of unsigned poems” return as specters, and trying to outrun them leaves speakers “grasping blindly like fantastical fins at the faces that swim by.”
Lempel’s lines work to make ravaged land flourish again, and what flowers forth is both lovely and heartbreaking. These are stories that deserve a cherished place in the canon of Jewish literature.