1073 N Benson Rd
Fairfield
CT 06824
FAIRFIELD, Conn. (April 14 2023)— On Thursday, April 20 at 7:30 p.m., Allison Schachter, PhD, associate professor of Jewish, English, Russian, and East European studies and the chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University will deliver the Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Scholar-in-Residence Lecture entitled “Fradl Shtok and Women Writing Jewish Modernity.” This lecture is free and open to the public, and will be delivered in-person at Fairfield’s DiMenna-Nyselius Library Auditorium (101). Please register to attend at fairfield.edu/bennettprograms.
What role did women play in the making of Yiddish literary modernity? We know too little about the women writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in transforming Jewish culture in the twentieth century. The standard accounts of modern Yiddish literary history exclude women’s writing and experience. When women appear they do so as poets, but not prose writers. This talk offers a counter history of modern Yiddish literature from the perspective of women, focusing on the life and work of the modernist writer, Fradl Shtok. Shtok was a well-regarded poet, who published a short story collection in 1919 and then mysteriously withdrew from Yiddish public life. Tracing her life story through archival records, and closely reading her literary work, Schachter pieces together a story of women’s artistic and literary lives in the first half of the twentieth century and offer a new account of Yiddish modernism.
Dr. Schachter is an associate professor of Jewish, English, Russian, and East European studies and the chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century.
Reservations are requested for this lecture. Please contact the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies at bennettcenter@fairfield.edu or call 203-254-4000, ext. 2066. For more information about other Bennett Center events, visit fairfield.edu/bennett.
Vol. 54, # 95
Fairfield University is a modern, Jesuit Catholic University, rooted in one of the world’s oldest intellectual and spiritual traditions. More than 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students from 36 states, 47 foreign countries, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are enrolled in the University’s five schools. In the spirit of rigorous and sympathetic inquiry into all dimensions of human experience, Fairfield welcomes students from diverse backgrounds to share ideas and engage in open conversations. The University is located in the heart of a region where the future takes shape, on a stunning campus on the Connecticut coast just an hour from New York City.