Beyond silence and forgetting: stories of women who wrote in Yiddish

Abstract

This article is the result of a research carried out with the objective of showing and analyzing autobiographical narratives of women reported in literary tales written in Yiddish, a language that almost disappeared in the 20th century, and which today is the focus of resistance movements. Hundreds of these stories were already published, but were only found in recent surveys. The research analyzes twenty-three of these short stories, four of which are the goal of this article. The results indicate, in the short stories, trajectories where struggles emerge, loss of places, people and dreams, a dense suffering reported sometimes with bitterness, with anger, sometimes even with a fine irony. The tales show, in the almost lost language, different ways of expressing sensations, desires and different forms of constriction. The writers talk about migration, displacements between continents, countries, cities, cultures that put them in a vulnerable situation because of what they saw, lived and wanted, and were not allowed or were unable to conquer, as well as the changes that were required of them to live.