On the Landing

In these sixteen stories, available in English for the first time, prize-winning author Yenta Mash traces an arc across continents, across upheavals and regime changes, and across the phases of a woman's life. Mash's protagonists are often in transit, poised "on the landing" on their way to or from somewhere else. In imaginative, poignant, and relentlessly honest prose, translated from the Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy, Mash documents the lost world of Jewish Bessarabia, the texture of daily life behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Moldova, and the challenges of assimilation in Israel. On the Landing opens by inviting us to join a woman making her way through her ruined hometown, recalling the colorful customs of yesteryear—and the night when everything changed. We then travel into the Soviet gulag, accompanying women prisoners into the fearsome forests of Siberia. In postwar Soviet Moldova, we see how the Jewish community rebuilds itself. On the move once more, we join refugees struggling to find their place in Israel. Finally, a late-life romance brings a blossoming of joy. Drawing on a lifetime of repeated uprooting, Mash offers an intimate perch from which to explore little-known corners of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A master chronicler of exile, she makes a major contribution to the literature of immigration and resilience, adding her voice to those of Jhumpa Lahiri, W. G. Sebald, André Aciman, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Mash's literary oeuvre is a brave achievement, and her work is urgently relevant today as displaced people seek refuge across the globe.

Yenta Mash (1922–2013) was born and raised in Bessarabia in southeastern Europe. She survived Siberian exile, then settled in Chisinau, Moldova, before immigrating to Israel. Her prize-winning fiction draws on her life, spanning continents, regime changes, and historical eras. Ellen Cassedy is the author of We Are Here and co-translator of Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories. She was a 2015 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow and this volume is a result of her fellowship.

The stories provide nuanced insight into their perspectives and psychology, perhaps it is the extremity of many of the stories' settings that draws the reader's attention to the universal and away from the particular.

Small gems.

An important contribution... much appreciated.

Dor ayn, dor oys, der emes blaybt! (From one generation to the next, the truth will out!)

Yenta Mash's stories are a must—a reminder that, through the persecutions in the Russian Pale, 'something very important has been lost,' but also that something strong survives.

Mash's collection keeps us alert to the riches to be discoveredshowing us the many worlds in which Yiddish thrived and suffered in the twentieth century.

Each story is a gem. Mash's narrative skill is quietly astonishing.

Mash's compact stories draw from her difficult life—including her experiences in the Siberian gulag, her postwar decades in Kishinev and her immigration to Israel in the 1970s. These small gems give voice both to the insufficiently documented story of Jewish deportees in Siberia and to the unique experience of Bessarabian Jews.

Ellen Cassedy has done marvelous work combing through Mash's four collections to select these stories and bringing them to life in an English that honors the beauty and texture of the author's vision. Highly recommended for all libraries.

Amos Lassen:

I urge you to have a look at these stories. They will change the way you see life.

Sebastian Schulman, executive director, KlezKanada:

Ellen Cassedy's translation of short stories by Yenta Mash gives voice to a near-forgotten writer and sheds light on a part of the Jewish people whose story and culture has been almost erased from the historical record.

Irena Klepfisz, author of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue:

Yenta Mash has left us rich images and complex responses to human betrayal and God's indifference in stories that are compelling and memorable.

Ruta Sepetys, author of Between Shades of Gray:

A moving collection of stories by an inspiring survivor who brings humanity to underrepresented history.

C.M. Mayo:

A transcendent achievement, a landmark book.