Dazed and Confused: Lamed Shapiro’s American Stories

Abstract

Lamed Shapiro ( 1 8781 948) is most widely known as the author of groundbreaking Yiddish short stories about pogroms, including the 1909 tale that made him famous, Cross.1 Shapiro's pogrom stories were revolutionary for a number of reasons. Foremost, at the turn of the century, they offered extremely graphic portraits of violence unlike anything that had been seen before. The tales challenged the notion that Jews become ennobled sufferers from their trauma, and that by undergoing it they are transformed into better people. Instead his stories suggest that brutality causes the victim to become more violent and debased. Also, his writings employed extremely lyrical, spare, and beautiful language to convey the events, and by so doing, they turned the trauma of the pogrom into the material of high art. Yet although these tales read as explicit and true renditions of antiJewish violence, Shapiro in fact never experienced a pogrom firsthand; these Yiddish stories were composed in the United States after he had emigrated in 1905 with his mother to seek employment and to make a clean break from the Ukrainian shtetl of his childhood.