by Melanie Weiss
A trove of Yiddish stories by women
An old man and woman rediscover a love they were denied in their youth. A daughter nurses her father to the very end. A bitter woman cares, barely, for abandoned bastard children. What makes these scenarios and other plot lines so surprising in Arguing with the Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers (The Feminist Press, $14.95) is not their foreignness but the emotional depths that resonate so profoundly. Editor Rhea Tregebov has culled these stories carefully, and each presents a kind of homespun clarity, a sophistication that comes not from cosmopolitanism but from the ability to accept a flawed but vitally alive world.