The Remarkable Backstory of Chana Blankshteyn’s Fear and Other Stories

Anita Norich visits with The Shmooze to talk about her translation of Chana Blankshteyn’s Fear and Other Stories. Yiddish writer Chana Blankshteyn (~1860–1939) was a woman who may be almost entirely forgotten now but was widely admired during her long and productive life. The mere existence of these stories is itself a remarkable feat as the collection was published in July 1939, just before the Nazis invaded Poland and two weeks before Blankshteyn’s death.