Serenade

Hailed as the first major woman poet in the modern Yiddish literary scene, and the author of equally compelling prose shaped in dialogue with Flaubert, Fradl Shtok was born in Skala, Galicia (today, Skala-Podilska, Ukraine). Orphaned at age ten and raised by relatives, she engaged seriously with German and European literature as a young woman and became one of the first Yiddish poets to experiment with the sonnet form, which Yiddish literature discovered belatedly amid modernist experimentation. Shtok immigrated in 1907 to New York, where she published poems and short stories in Yiddish anthologies and miscellanies, especially those associated with the literary movement Di Yunge (The Young Ones). A collection of her stories appeared in 1919. Both her poetry, which employs classical form, and her prose, which employs modernist modes of free indirect discourse, share themes of desire, psychic suffering, the blurry relationship between art and life, and women’s striving for freedom and artistic voice in a modern world hardly less patriarchal than that of the old world. Although her work sparked substantial interest among the critical milieu of the Yiddish literary scene, she was frustrated by mixed and patronizing reviews, with the Bundist-turned-Communist critic Moissaye Joseph Olgin attacking her as a reactionary naturalist and the great modernist poet and taste-maker A. Leyeles deeming her monotonous and too given to “temperament.” Beset by material and family difficulties as well, she largely disappeared from the Yiddish literary scene in the 1920s. Her 1923 Yiddish play, Der amerikaner (The American), was never performed despite being acquired by Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theatre. In 1927, Shtok wrote an English-language novel Musicians Only, but it received little critical attention. A 1942 story sent to the Yiddish paper Forverts is the last indication of her literary activity. For a few years in the early 1940s, Shtok lived in Los Angeles, but she eventually returned to New York to work for her cousin as a dressmaker. In 1966, she was admitted to the Rockland State psychiatric hospital; she died there, perhaps as late as 1990, although the Yiddish literary scene generally believed she had died years earlier and framed her life in pathological terms more as a curio than as a key to important art.