Blume Lempel (in English she stressed her surname on the second syllable) might not be a familiar name in most Jewish or American literature classes. However, the unique Yiddish short stories she wrote towards the end of the twentieth century are sure to captivate any reader. Lempel was born in Khorostkov, Galicia (today in Ukraine), in 1907 (or perhaps 1910) as Blume Leye Pfeffer and died in Long Island, New York, in 1999. Her life spanned most of the twentieth century, from her childhood and adolescence in pre-war Eastern Europe, to her young adulthood in Paris, to her six decades in the United States. As a child, she attended a kheyder (traditional religious school) and a Hebrew elementary school. In 1929, she immigrated to Paris to join her brother who was living there at the time. Together with her husband, she left Paris for New York in 1939 at the cusp of World War II. Her first short story was published in 1943 in a New York Yiddish newspaper, and she continued to publish short stories in periodicals around the world, and later in two collected volumes. Although she was widely published and even recognized with several awards and prizes in the Yiddish cultural sphere later in life, she did not break into the mainstream American Jewish literary community.
In the short story “Neighbors Over the Fence” the relationship between two women, Betty, an Eastern European Jew, and Mrs. Zagretti, an Italian Catholic, takes center stage. The two women share an immigrant background, though they never explicitly discuss either this commonality or their differing cultures and religions. However, the women slowly bond over their shared practice of gardening, keeping a friendly distance on either side of the fence.
This kit gathers together oral histories, letters, and contemporaneous writings to give context to Lempel’s story, and to help students explore some of the complexities of Jewish modernist writing.
Cover image: Blume Lempel's typewriter, photographed by Adah Hetko, 2019.
Teachers' guide
Reading and Background
- Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub's translation of “Neighbors Over the Fence” appeared in the Yiddish Book Center's 2013 Pakn Treger Digital Translation Issue.
- The volume Oedipus in Brooklyn (Mandel Vilar Press and Dryad Press, 2016) offers the most comprehensive set of translations of Blume Lempel’s short stories into English. More information on this volume, as well as a comprehensive overview of reading resources related to the book can be found here on the Yiddish Book Center’s website. “Neighbors Over the Fence” can be found in this collection.
- This encyclopedia entry from the Jewish Women’s Archive gives a short biographical overview of Blume Lempel’s life.
- The Pakn Treger article “Modern in Autumn” discusses Lempel’s life as a writer and includes several photographs.
- In “Discovering and Translating Yiddish Writer Blume Lempel,” (an episode of the Yiddish Book Center's podcast The Shmooze), translator Ellen Cassedy speaks about what drew her and fellow translator Yermiyahu Ahron Taub to Lempel’s stories and gives a taste of her bold, surprising work.
- The article “To Dive into the Self: The Svive of Blume Lempel” by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub analyzes the themes and aesthetics of Blume Lempel’s oeuvre of short stories. The article also discusses Blume Lempel’s friendships with other Yiddish women writers, such as Chava Rosenfarb and Malka Heifetz-Tussman.
- Other translations of Lempel’s work can be found in anthologies including Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories. Translations have also appeared in the journal Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends and in the Yiddish Book Center’s Pakn Treger. Many of these translations are testament to the important groundwork that Jewish feminists have laid in making Yiddish women writers accessible to a broader (mostly English-speaking) audience.
- The essay “Queens of Contradiction: A Feminist Introduction to Yiddish Women Writers” by Irena Klepfisz in the anthology Found Treasures is an excellent and rich resource for discovering the broader history of Yiddish women writers in which Blume Lempel was embedded. A translation of Lempel’s piece “Correspondences” also appears in this anthology. Irena Klepfisz also describes the search for Yiddish women writers in this oral history interview.
- For more recent discussions about discovering, translating, teaching, and reading Yiddish women’s prose, consult the articles “The Feminine Ending: On Women’s Writing in Yiddish, Now Available in English” by Madeleine Cohen, “Translating and Teaching Yiddish Prose by Women” by Anita Norich, and “The 2087th Question or When Silence Is the Only Answer” by Irena Klepfisz.
- For more information about free indirect discourse, a modernist narration technique Lempel uses in the short story, see the Oxford Research Encyclopedia.