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INTRODUCTION

Blume Lempel (1907-1999) was a remarkably original storyteller — unique in her style, her narrative strategies, and her subject matter. With their lyrical, idiosyncratic imagery, her sentences often evoke an unsettling blend of splendor and menace. Many of the storylines are characterized by restless flashbacks, jarring juxtapositions, uneven pacing, and abrupt endings. “I like to start at the end and work backward,” she said. “Or start in the middle. Or begin with some strange subject and then change the character entirely and start all over again.”

Lempel’s narratives migrate between past and present, Old World and New, dream and reality. Some stories resemble collages whose carefully arranged fragments reverberate against one another, wandering from modern-day New York to prewar Poland, bedtime story to passionate romance, old age dementia to girlhood dreams. The boundaries between real and unreal can be fragile and permeable. Cosmic landscapes rub up against domestic scenes. Multiple time periods coexist on a single page.

Lempel was drawn to subjects that were seldom explored by other writers in Yiddish in her time — abortion, prostitution, women’s erotic imaginings, incest. With rare acuity, she explores her characters’ inner lives; faced with impossible choices, they tend to resist grand, heroic action. Instead, they engage in a struggle with memory, mood, and shifts in consciousness as they confront the madness of history and sometimes seek to fend off the oncoming madness of the self. Often they are propelled by encounters with powerful natural forces, which can be feverish and erotically tinged or full of horror.

Blume Lempel’s life traced a trajectory from Eastern Europe to Paris to New York. Born Blume Leye Pfeffer in Khorostkiv, a small town in what was then Galicia (now western Ukraine), she grew up in what she described as “a white-washed room by the banks of a river that had no name.” Her father was a butcher; her mother read novels and was considered learned by the townspeople. For several years, Blume attended a religious school for girls and a Hebrew folk school, and at times a tutor came to the house; still, her formal education was minimal.

As a child, she recalled, “I didn’t write at all; I only dreamed of writing.” Throughout her girlhood years, however, she was storing up sights and sounds that she would later weave into her stories — images of wheat fields shimmering in the sun, boots covered with dust from the mill, beggars and pickpockets in the market square, the sounds of Hasidic melodies, the springtime concert of the frogs, fiery Zionist speeches.

When Blume was twelve, her mother died, her father remarried, and she was pressed into service as a housekeeper and nursemaid for the new couple and their young child. In 1929, at 22, she left home intending to become a pioneer in Palestine. On the way, she stopped off in Paris to visit her brother Yisroel — he had fled Khorostkiv after being arrested for revolutionary activity and settled in the vibrant Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Belleville. Blume was captivated by the City of Light and abandoned her pioneer plans. She attended night school, began writing poetry, and found a job in the fur industry, where she met Lemel (Leon) Lempel. The couple married and had two children.

As Hitler’s power grew, the family managed to secure immigration papers and sailed for New York in 1939. Blume had been exceptionally happy in Paris and had every intention of returning, but it was not to be. The Lempels settled permanently in New York, first in Brooklyn and later in Long Beach, off the south shore of Long Island, on the Atlantic Ocean.

Soon after arriving in the U.S., Lempel began to write short stories. Her first published work, “Muter un tokhter” (“Mother and Daughter”), appeared in the Yiddish daily newspaper Der tog in 1943 under the pseudonym Rokhl Halperin, the name of an aunt. A few years later, the New York newspaper Morgn frayhayt serialized her panoramic novel of prewar Paris, Tsvishn tsvey veltn (Between Two Worlds), which features a romance between a Jewish woman and a Nazi. It was published in English in 1954 as Storm over Paris.

These promising literary beginnings were stymied, however, as Lempel’s home responsibilities increased. Her aunt Rokhl moved in, a third child was born, and an orphaned nephew joined the family. More than these obligations, though, it was the devastating news from across the Atlantic that brought her writing to a standstill. Her father’s wife and their young son, she learned, had been killed by the Nazis; her father then set fire to the family home and hanged himself. Her brother, who had joined the French resistance, was arrested and shot in Lyon. Increasingly despondent, she felt “paralyzed within a self-imposed prison,” she wrote later. “The years went by, many desolate, fruitless years.”

A turning point came when a friend suggested she try writing about the catastrophic events that were consuming her. Taking up her pen once more, she discovered a new literary calling: to “speak for those who could no longer speak, feel for those who could no longer feel, immerse myself in their unlived lives, their sorrows, their joys, their struggle and their death.”

Having left Europe on the eve of World War II, Lempel did not directly experience the roundups, mass executions, and concentration camps of the Holocaust. She offers glimpses of these, while powerfully exploring the experience of displacement, flight, and adaptation, as well as the special burden of remembrance and retribution, grief and guilt, carried by the living.

By the beginning of the 1970’s, Lempel’s poems and short stories were being published regularly in Yiddish periodicals in the U.S. and abroad, including Zayn, Tsukunft, Undzer eygn vort, Yidishe kultur, Forverts, Yidisher kemfer, and Algemayner dzhurnal (New York); Khezhbn (California); Di goldene keyt, Bay zikh, Naye tsaytung, and Yisroel shtime (Israel); Letste nayes (Australia); Undzer veg (Paris); and Dorem afrike (South Africa). Many of her stories were collected in two volumes published in Tel Aviv, Israel: A rege fun emes (A Moment of Truth) in 1981 and Balade fun a kholem (Ballad of a Dream) in 1986.

Over the years, Lempel received numerous Yiddish literary prizes and became part of the worldwide Yiddish literary network. As the number of Yiddish literary writers diminished, they sustained one another through constant communication. She was fortunate to win support from the renowned poet Abraham Sutzkever, the founder and editor of Di goldene keyt. In Tel Aviv, the poets Binem Heller and Yankev-Tsvi Shargel helped shepherd her volumes to publication. She engaged in warm correspondence with the writers Chava Rosenfarb and Malka Heifetz Tussman; her personal papers contain letters from numerous critics and fans, including such literary figures as Chaim Grade and Yonia Fain.

Over the course of her career, Lempel attended writing classes and read widely, but she remained fiercely self-directed. While her decision to write in Yiddish was a carefully considered choice, integral to her literary mission, she did not feel part of a literary “school” or trend in any language. Asked by an interviewer about writers who had influenced her, she could not cite any. “I feel I don’t borrow from anyone,” she said.

Old age did not stop Lempel’s creative output. When her husband Leon died in 1986, Blume wrote in a poem that she had “nothing more to tell/ nothing more to say.” In fact, however, her stories and poems continued to appear in the 1990’s, when she was well into her eighties.

Blume Lempel died in 1999 in Long Beach, New York, at the age of 93. Her extraordinary stories live on.

Ellen Cassedy

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub