Celebrated primarily as the poet who wrote the first sonnet in Yiddish, Fradel Shtok was also a masterful prose stylist. She published a single collection of short fiction in 1919 that was dismissed by some critics for its embrace of prose narrative techniques that made her more akin to Flaubert than to Sholem Aleichem. The lore about Shtok is that traumatized by negative reviews, she died in an asylum. However, this was not true: she continued to write in Yiddish, and died in LA years after news of her tragic death. This talk offers a revised account of Yiddish modernism, one that acknowledges the centrality of woman to the modern Jewish revolution.

There is both an accessible elevator and gender-neutral restroom on the first and second floor. If you have a disability that requires an accommodation, contact judaicstudies@umich.edu or 734-763-9047.