Else Jerusalem — Red House Alley with Translator Stephanie Gorrell Ortega

Else Jerusalem’s Red House Alley is a riveting exposé of the sex industry in fin-de-siècle Vienna. A bestseller upon its 1909 publication, the novel was banned by the Nazis in 1933 (along with its 1928 film adaptation) and fell into obscurity. Boiler House Press published the first full English translation of this landmark work last year, and translator Stephanie Gorrell Ortega joins us to discuss Jerusalem’s richly-drawn account of brothel workers (based on accounts from real prostitutes). We also draw comparisons with this year’s Academy Award-winning “Best Picture,” Anora. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Red House Alley by Else Jerusalem

Life and photos of Else Jerusalem

Anora

The Diary of a Lost Girl by Margarite Böhme

The DIary of a Lost Girl film

Young Vienna movement

Rebellion in the Brothel documentary about the Regina Riehl trial

Celestina Truxa

Felix Salten

Hermann Bahr

Arthur Schnitzler

Karl Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Pretty Baby

David Copperfield

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 106 on Dirty Helen Cromwell

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 197 on Helen Tracy Lowe Porter

Transcript

Else Jerusalem (Red House Alley) with Stephanie Gorrell Ortega

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. This episode marks our last full length free episode of the summer. Kim and I are going to enjoy a little time off, and we'll be back in late September. In the meantime though, we'll continue to air new twice monthly bonus episodes throughout the summer, starting at just $3 a pop if you subscribe. So if you'd like access to those or you just wanna show your support, go to lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron.” There are plenty of exclusive bonus episodes in our back catalog, so it's a great way to bide your time while you're waiting for us to return. And now let's dive into today's show. 

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off for forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes. And Amy, I hear we have your legendary insomnia to thank for today's episode, right?

AMY: Yes, here's the deal. I got a copy of this book, Else Jerusalem's Red House Alley, late last year from Boiler House Press, and I was happy to receive it, but the holidays were coming up. I was about to go on a trip. I kind of placed this book in a large pile of books on my desk and then proceeded to forget about it. Then just a few months ago, I couldn't sleep. For whatever reason, I remembered that I had this book. I turned on the light, flipped it open to the first page. I only thought I would just read the first sentence or two just to see what it's even about. Well, you know that AC/DC song “Thunderstruck?” 

KIM: We need to play that in the background. 

AMY: Yes. That is pretty much what came over me as I started to read this book. I think I had read only the first page and a half before I whipped out my laptop and emailed Brad Bigelow from Boilerhouse Press and I said, “I am in love. We are moving this book to the front of our queue immediately.” Like, that's how struck I was by what I was reading. So it was definitely a middle-of-the-night surprise. 

KIM: Wow. That's quite an endorsement, Amy, and it's easy to understand why. Red House Alley is a bildungsroman set in a Viennese brothel in the late 19th century. The book’s heroine, Milada, is born into a pleasure house and grows up to become its manager. How's that for an elevator pitch?

AMY: Yeah, and it's interesting because at the time I picked this book up, I had just recently, seen the film Anora, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and I'd seen a lot of reviews celebrating the movie as a feminist triumph. 

KIM: Yeah, Amy and I have talked a lot about that movie and our thoughts. Yes, yes.

AMY: I did enjoy the movie, but I was struggling with this idea that it was somehow a feminist masterpiece. Because in that movie we know very little about Anora's actual life. Her past, her friendships. We see her more through the lens of the staight male gaze, let's be honest.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: But in this 1909 novel by Jerusalem, she takes us directly inside the heads and hearts of her prostitutes, and she based her characters on the testimony of real women. The book underscores the way society systematically robs sex workers of their youth, their health, their autonomy, and their dreams. The main character, Milada, is determined to be the exception in this novel, but it's not a fairy tale in the vein of Pretty Woman.

KIM: No, exactly. I mean, Jerusalem's frank realism earned this book instant critical acclaim and bestseller status. It actually went through 22 printings in its first two years, and it was translated into many other languages from its original German. It was actually adapted into a German film in 1928. (The original Anora you could say.) But thanks to Boiler House Press's recovered book series, this novel's available again in English, and we are thrilled to actually have the translator of this new edition with us today to discuss it.

AMY: So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Stephanie Gorrell Ortega, earned her doctorate degree in German literature from UT Austin and has taught at the Free University of Berlin, SUNY Buffalo, the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and Texas State University. In translating Red House Alley, Stephanie read and reread Jerusalem's masterpiece dozens upon dozens of times to ensure the accuracy of her work. And Stephanie, what a wonderful job you did with this translation. It's a page turner, and I know Else gets the credit, but I think you do too. Welcome to the show. We're so happy to have you. 

STEPHANIE ORTEGA: Well, thank you first off, both of you, so very much for being in touch with me and for doing this podcast. I feel it's a real honor. I like your analogy of the film Anora to the 1928 film, which when the Nazis came to power four years later was destroyed. So we don't have that film anymore. But what came to mind in thinking about your analogy was another film that was made the subsequent year called The Diary of a Lost Girl. The film was based on a novel that came out at the same time as Jerusalem’s novel. It was supposed to be the true life story as the prostitute herself had recorded it. It was phenomenally popular in its time. It was erotica, and the film was an erotic film. There was the same, what you're calling male gaze, but the presentation of flesh and glamor that was, titillating, that was supposed to catch, I would say, straight young men's attention. So how do you combine a film that is sympathetic to prostitutes as human beings and at the same time consumes them like commodities? I mean, there's an essential disjuncture. 

AMY: Yes. 

STEPHANIE: And, uh, in a hundred years we haven't gotten past that. When you brought Anora to my attention, I had to watch it in small increments because I found it so disturbing. It was just flesh skin, sex, sex.

KIM: And by the way, Anora won a lot of awards and was nominated for a lot of things. So yeah. It's interesting. We still keep coming back to the same things. So let's go back and talk a little bit about Else Jerusalem and the intellectual and cultural milieu she was living and writing in so we can get a little bit of context as we enter this discussion.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. Um, she was born in 1876 just after the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the sort of grandfluorescence of the Fin de Siecle art scene in Berlin, London, Paris, and of course also in, uh, Vienna. As a Jewish girl in a Conservative (not Orthodox, but Conservative) household, she grew up quite sheltered, privileged. Her father owned a business in trading wines throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so she was exposed, I guess intellectually, socially, but sheltered. At age 20, she was married to a man who was, if not wealthy, certainly well-to-do. She had a daughter. And then the year after that, she had a son. So at age 22 and 23, she was the mother of small children. At that time, she wrote a reference work called Tell Us the Truth, which was basically like what we would now consider a middle school sex education class. Which ruffled people. How could a nice lady from a good Jewish conservative home with children, do something like this? 

KIM: So she was already so bold from the beginning. 

STEPHANIE: Yeah, she was.

KIM: Wow. 

STEPHANIE: She had gone to the University of Vienna, so, high-quality education, for eight semesters or four years. But of course, women were not registered and so she couldn't get a degree. She just wanted to do it. She hung out at that time, in her twenties and thirties, with a group of writers called Young Vienna — Jung Vien. And, um, I don't know how seriously she was taken. If you google Young Vienna, you see primarily well-known writers, but some other artists as well. There was Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Bahr, um, Felix Salten, who wrote Bambi, who [also] wrote the nastiest piece of smut you can ever believe. 

AMY: Oh my gosh, what? 

STEPHANIE: Oh, he was shrewd. He was absolutely shrewd. Writing pornography, which was illustrated lavishly a Jew from her same little neighborhood. He was never censored by the Nazis, whereas her work was censored. Not because she was a Jew, not because it was pornography. To my mind it is because she was a woman, obviously. After she wrote the novel and her children were then like seven and eight, she became, like instantaneously, a celebrity and traveled not only around the Austro-Hungarian empire, but also around Germany giving readings. When she returned to Vienna, there’s an indication in her letters she had something of a collapse, um, exhaustion. She was ridiculed, she was attacked. People said things like, she could only have been a prostitute. How else would she have known anything? So she had a collapse, and for a year and a half she was out of pocket. And then she had a reading in Vienna and met a young man several years younger than herself, and they fell in love. She got baptized as a Lutheran and they left the country. She left her children and her husband and the whole circle of people that she had known. Every bit of privilege and security that she had. And when she moved to Argentina, she never really could recover. She didn't fit in. Essentially after that, the man that she thought she was wildly in love with, kind of dumped her and declared her insane. And she was put away in a psychiatric hospital, which is where she died. 

KIM: Oh my gosh. Wow. 

AMY: I wanna back up though, to, you know, this idea of she could only have written this novel if she had been a prostitute herself, because that's not actually the genesis of this novel. There is a really interesting story though. What inspired it?

STEPHANIE: Well, because she was recognized as an intellectual and she was connected through this group of writers, she was chosen to be one of two women, to witness a trial of a madam in Vienna. This madam was named Regina Riehl. And if you Google it, it was a big deal. One of the girls escaped Riehl’s brothel, and spoke with a journalist who took this to the courts and sued her and sued her on every kind of charge. The girls who worked in the brothel (and they were between 14 and 17), testified at that trial. Jerusalem heard their testimonies, and spoke with them afterwards. She was there with another woman named Colestine Truxa. And Truxa was very active in the women's movement and had herself traveled a lot to see where these children were being trafficked from. Both women kept in touch for years, and I'm convinced that Truxa’s life is suggested with the school director in Milada's school. The very compassionate woman who shows her respect and gives her dignity and literacy. so, um, yeah, Jerusalem participated in that trial and, uh, this last year, because the legal age of consent in Austria is still 14 because they still have registered brothels and the prostitutes who are registered are subjected to the same terms, the same regulations that they were 120 years ago. A filmmaker named Stefan Ludwig made a documentary about the Riehl trial. It was shown on national television this year. And once again, people were shocked. 

KIM: I am shocked right now. I feel so naive; I had no idea, I thought we were talking about the past. 

AMY: Right. Like I thought this book was an artifact 

STEPHANIE: And then there's Anora, right? 

AMY: Right.

KIM: We need this. Everyone needs to read this book. Um, Yeah. 

AMY: Okay, so let's dive into it then. I want to start at the beginning where Else Jerusalem, before she even starts the novel, she gives this very brief exhortation to women readers in particular. And I'm just gonna read what she writes 

To You!

You girls dancing, laughing brides, mothers at play,

This book belongs to You.

From the apex of your Lives may You hear down to the nadir.

From the light of Your lives direct Your gaze into darkness.

May You feel where You have long judged.

Stop to think where You have too long passed by.

And let Your empathy greet with grace these You have

Offered up for Your

Good fortune.

.

So that struck me right away what is she trying to accomplish here? Stephanie, in addressing women readers explicitly before she starts the novel.

STEPHANIE: Let me just comment. Hearing you read it is very moving for me. I read her words and heard them in my imagination. To hear you read In American English, it's just very powerful. I think she was quite unique. I haven't found any other author, and I'm a student of German women's literature, right? I haven't found anybody else who just reaches out and grabs her readers. And she does this throughout. She turns away from the voice of the narrator, which is very cultivated, elegant, but easy. Like I think of, um, House of Mirth, that kind of elegant, but easy, late-Victorian use of language. That's the way the narrator presents the story. And then suddenly in the middle of a paragraph, she'll say, “but don't you know his father was footing the bill?” Or “You have to remember folks, this –” And this is the background. 

KIM: It pulls the reader in like you are being told the story.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. 

KIM: Yep. 

STEPHANIE: And it has the feel to me of an older woman telling, like a fairytale from the very beginning. And I wonder, Amy, when you say you were grabbed after a page and a half in a somnambulant state, if it wasn't that sort of intimacy of language that struck you. 

AMY: Well, I'll tell you what, when you just said the word fairytale, that resonates. There was something about that opening passage, which I'm actually going to have you read. It has that evocative quality of you're being led into this alley with the red light glowing and kind of feels misty, it's that enchanted quality. I was mesmerized.

KIM: Yes.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. And, and at the same time, there's this ominousness, just like a fairytale. There's some gloomy reality that we're being led to, but with this, charmed kind of language, yeah, 

AMY: I got goosebumps reading it and it was like a spell was being cast over me. Yes. And so Stephanie, um, I'm gonna have you actually read this first section for listeners and it is a longer excerpt than we normally read on this show. It's about five minutes, listeners, but I think it's really worth hearing the whole thing because like me and the reaction I had, you're just gonna wanna run out and grab the book as soon as you hear Stephanie read this.

STEPHANIE: I'm so touched that you say that. Yeah. Okay. 

AMY: So take it away for us.

STEPHANIE: [reads]

KIM: Wow. That was incredible, Stephanie. 

AMY: Yeah, the imagery, it feels cinematic. So that's the passage that I read where I was like, “We are doing this book.” Wow. 

STEPHANIE: I think this would make the most incredible film. 

AMY: Or even like a HBO series, because there are so many characters and she delves into each and every minor character. They have a fully built story that you could turn around and do a full episode on each girl in the house. I mean, it's ripe for being adapted. 

KIM: Okay, so we're into the story right here. I mean, as you heard listeners, you're immediately there. Do you want to, Stephanie, briefly summarize the plot for our listeners so they know, without giving too many spoilers, what's going on here?

STEPHANIE: Yeah. Um, as you had said, it's both a bildungsroman and an exposé of the sex industry. It's set in the 1860s, well before Jerusalem's time. It took me a long time to really step back and see how very accurate the history is, because I was wrapped up In the main character, Milada. She's born in a flop house to a mother who's 17 or 16. As the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary became more and more regulated in the 1870s, prostitution was illegal if you were a street walker, which is what people had been. But the state offered this option. You could live a fairly stable or secure life (while you were a young thing) in a brothel. Regular brothels were like venues of entertainment. You could gamble, play cards, drink. There were little side booths where a prostitute could come and, you know, service you. They were like men's clubs or something basically. So, Milada as a young teenager lives in an official state brothel where people pay taxes. And her mother falls ill. I researched this. Her mother probably was using arsenic to prevent pregnancy. That was the standard among prostitutes at the time, and a good number of the girls and women died that very same death. Milada's mother dies when, uh, she's only 30 um, at that time, Milada is an orphan. So she's an official ward of the brothel. She becomes a prostitute there in the brothel, when she is 15 or 16. The woman who has turned the old flop house into a brothel to make it kind of upscale, this new madam took Milada under her wings. She was more or less a mother to her. It sounds bizarre, but she protected her. She made sure she had food, and she told Milada when Milada signed the contract to be a formal tax-paying prostitute with the city, that when she left the business, the business would go to her. She'd instructed her how to bring in new recruits, she taught her everything. And so there was Milada in her early twenties, functioning as the manager of a high-tone, very well known brothel just off of Ring Street.

AMY: The Ringstrasse. Yes. 

STEPHANIE: And she is smart and she's educated and she meets a young man who is very wealthy. It's her ticket out.

AMY: Right, right. Uh, and then she has a big decision to make. Yeah.

KIM: Yeah, so everybody just leaps off the page. We're introduced to this revolving door of young women. They all have different personalities. They come from different backgrounds. Um, Stephanie, you've engaged in so many readings of the novel as you're dissecting it at this granular level to translate it, can you help us pin down where Jerusalem's mastery lies? What makes this book so good?

STEPHANIE: Well, the playfulness with language really swept me away. But I think many people were first taken with the vibrancy of the characters. Milada herself is heroic and she sort of steps forth full-fledged as a hero when she's six years old and we first encounter her. 

KIM: Yeah, I've been describing it to people as if David Copperfield or some other Dickens character, like wandered onto the set of Pretty Baby, but with like a feminist viewpoint. The characters are so vivid and there's so many of them, but they all remain very clear and interesting throughout. And they're all connected in different ways, you know, as you would have in a Dickens novel. So you've got this great plot and all these characters, but then this beautiful writing.

AMY: I love novels that have lots of dialogue and there's so much dialogue and that also makes it feel like you're reading a movie almost. You do a really great job, Stephanie, at translating everything and making it feel modern, you know? 

STEPHANIE: Thank you so much. There was one other point about what, um, struck me here with her use of language. Not only did she have the persona of a narrator and address her audience directly or intimately, she also used internal monologue in a really extraordinary way. There's like no parallel in literature that I can think of from that time.

AMY: And you need it. You needed that. And that's what we weren't getting from Anora. You're not actually getting her interiority at all.

KIM: And making her dimensional. Yeah. 

AMY: And in this book, you really, really do. Another element that I love about this novel is how the timeline of the plot actually sets up sort of the timeline of the industry, like the regulations happening. Each successive madam that comes in to manage the Red House, some good, some are not so good) but they offer a glimpse at a different type of brothel. You know, you have the high end, you have the kind of cheap and dirty, um, and how they procure the girls. It really explains how the whole system works. 

KIM: The madams actually made me think of another real life madam whose riveting autobiography we actually featured on the podcast, um, her name was Dirty Helen Cromwell, and that's episode No. 106, listeners, if you wanna go back later and have a listen to that one, but let's get back to Red House Alley and another pivotal character. One of the frequent visitors to Red House is a man named Horner. He's a philosopher who casts himself almost as a Svengali, of sorts, offering Milada spiritual guidance about her profession. He compares her to a sacred scarab who takes care of the filthy dung heaps that get left behind. Wow. So in the book, Horner and Milada sit and have deep conversations, he's trying to empower her in this really creepy way. But for what exactly, Stephanie, what is his aim here? 

STEPHANIE: I'll have to say the character Horner was the most enigmatic for me. We get sort of by innuendo and whatever, that he was homosexual. Horner never really acknowledges who Milada is or accepts that she's intelligent. He's completely solipsistic. It's about himself and pontificating and the, uh, philosophy that he spouts is some kind of crazy mashup of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and whatever else. And eventually he does go mad. What he wants, I can't figure out except, uh, just the adoration of an acolyte.

AMY: I think he almost sees her as a curiosity that he wants to put thoughts in her head, this was a movie, he would be cast with, uh, John Malkovich because it's like he's kind of sensitive and kind, but you really don't trust him. Even though she kind of admires him and she takes what he says to heart, there comes a point where she bristles against him as the reader does also.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

STEPHANIE: And when they part ways, he says, “We both despise each other.” 

AMY: yeah. Yeah. It's a very weird relationship and I'm not surprised to hear you say that was a challenge for you, um, as you were working on this book. Um, but let's talk about this other young man in the book. It's another comparison that we could make to Anora. There's a young medical student, Gustav, who is very similar to Vanya in Anora because he develops a passionate attraction to Milada and begs her to run away with him. You at first kind of find him endearing, but then over time you realize how feckless and annoying he is. And by the end, his father, who is a wealthy man, ends up offering Milada a sizable cash bribe to break things off with Gustav. Um, I think you mentioned, Stephanie, in an email to us that he's actually based on a real person, Gustav's father? 

STEPHANIE: Yeah, Gustav was a student of Horner, and Horner recalls an essay that Gustav wrote at age eight, “My father is the richest man in town.” And that sent me thinking, Who was the richest man in Else Jerusalem's town, Vienna, when she was around there in the early 20th century? And it was Karl Wittgenstein, the father of Ludwig Wittgeenstein. Also the name that this character Gustav's father has in the novel is David Brenner. And for a German, that's a flag. That's a Jewish name. And Karl Wittgenstein, of course, came from a Jewish family. He, himself, was baptized a Lutheran, but he raised his kids, like Ludwig, the baby of the family, as Catholics. That's very similar to Gustav's upbringing. So you can really connect all the dots that there was one family that was being represented. 

AMY: Oh my God. The amount of research you've clearly done on this book and all of these characters… my mind is blown because it's actually a very hefty book. It's not a short book. So the amount of work you had to do in piecing this all together. The book kept making me think of Emil Zola and Nana.

KIM: Oh, totally. Yes, Nana. Yeah, absolutely.

AMY: Although with Nana, that character, I, I read that so long ago that I don't remember that much, but Nana was so flighty to me. She was so like trivial and a little like powder puff in my memory 

STEPHANIE: But also malicious. She was a man-eater. I mean, she was a femme fatale by the time she was 16, where Milada, by 16, has had this epiphany about being compassionate,

AMY: Yeah. And Milada's… she is very compassionate, but she is so in a very no-nonsense, tough love kind of way. Right. she's a business woman. She does care about the girls in the house, but she isn't going to, um…

KIM: She knows she can't save them. She's just trying to make their lives a little easier in the ways that she can. 

AMY: Yeah, yeah, 

STEPHANIE: One moment, one day. That's time enough, yeah. 

KIM: So she explains to Gustav why she stays, she says, Any act of kindness I perform for these girls is real. And that one minute is blessed. Gus, I have to help my compassion for people like me burns in my breast. It hurts like a wound. One thing and one thing only has ever moved me the love I feel for these suffering creatures.

Iinitially I actually thought she and Gus were going to try to help them get out. But then you realize, oh, actually that's not realistic. She can't do that. Like the way the system is set up, the only thing she can do is help them in the way that she does. And it's kind of, um, incredible that she has the stamina and wherewithal through everything that she's dealing with to keep doing that all the way through.

AMY: Yeah. And she does have the opportunity to get out (and she does get out) but then she goes back. she goes back because she's like, “I need to do something.” 

STEPHANIE: That was after this one young girl committed suicide and she had to know for herself what had led to her despair. And at that moment when she, um, reenters the house, and at that point it's specifically for clients of the Habsburg court. So not just aristocrats, but the nobility, So they've really stepped up their game as far as attracting clientele and at the same time becoming ever more restrictive and controlling of the girls. When she could see the trajectory, you know, with the institutionalization of the brothel, um, it was becoming so much more rigid. She knew she was powerless.

AMY: It's interesting that despite the fact that it's detailing depictions of life in a brothel, it's not prurient. It's not graphic. Um, Jerusalem kind of alludes to sex acts, but she never describes them explicitly. All that action takes place behind closed doors. And in fact, I even kind of had expected it to be a little more explicit, especially, when Milada makes a transition from just like the house girl to okay, now you're gonna be a working girl here. I thought that would be a pivotal moment that the reader would be taken in. 

STEPHANIE: She dangles that. You're waiting to see. Yeah.

AMY: Right. It was building up to that. 'cause you're like, oh gosh, she's so young. But she's gonna have to start working. But she doesn't dwell on that moment at all. And it feels like she's giving these women and girls the restraint and the sort of respect and decency that they did not get in real life.

STEPHANIE: There's not one titillating scene in there. And when the madam does assign her a client, she's only 15, when do we hear about that moment? It's years later when she's 25 and Gustav wants to have sex with her and he is pinning her down and she's saying, “No, you're hurting me,” that she has a flashback to this first experience. And she has been depersonalized during sex ever since. She doesn't feel she has a consciousness. She is a body.

AMY: Yep. 

STEPHANIE: And the word “violence” is only used one time when Milada’s 15 and scrubbing the tiles of the entry in the brothel. The madam comes up and asks her how old she is and she lies and says 16. Then she goes up into her room and says she has this inexpungeable feeling, some sort of premonition, and then there's just colon: violence.

AMY: Mm. We're talking about how great this book would be for a film or TV adaptation, but therein lies the problem. Again, could they do this without showing the sex explicitly? No, it would be all over the place in an HBO series. Right? And I think that changes it once you show it. And I don't say that as someone prudish. I think there's a time and a place to show that sort of thing in other stories. But in this particular one, it negates the whole point of the book when you show it, you know? 

KIM: Yes. I liked what you said about respect, um, showing respect to the women. Okay. So despite this being a huge success at the time, it basically fell off people's radars just a few decades later. Stephanie, what happened? 

STEPHANIE: Well, in 1933 when Adolf Hitler was then in power, it was banned. There was a cultural ministry that declared it ?? which is something like in “indecorous” and the reason that it was thrown out, burned, in the great book burnings of ‘33, was that it treated prostitution. I don't think really, that the censors actually sat down and read the thing. As I said before, uh, Jerusalem of course, was a Jew, obviously. Um, it treated prostitution, but she was a woman who treated prostitution – that made it obscene. And then of course, the film that was made in 1928 was also burned. We don't have a trace of that. It had gone missing because after the war, nobody retrieved it. Germanist people whose life work is looking at German cultural history, literary history, didn't dig it out because I think it was just too painful to review what the Nazis had destroyed. It's becoming a thing right now. There are whole groups, voluntary and institutional, like through academia that are pulling out things that had been banned. 

KIM: I love that.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. In 2016, as I said, it was republished and it became something of a phenomenon among people in, you know, gender studies and whatever. But, um, I asked two young women in Vienna to please read it and tell me what they thought about the use of language. And they petered out about Chapter Two because they thought the language was too archaic and weird and they couldn't, they couldn't cope with all the use of dialect, 

AMY: I wonder if there's something about an English translation that's helpful or you know, like I'm not denying that they had that experience, but I just didn't have that experience whatsoever in an English version. 

STEPHANIE: That was really my objective. I was always straddling staying as true as possible to the original and considering a readership who, in America or in the UK or Canada, would read this big, long chunk of a thing if it didn't come across as topical. I kept thinking of Edith Wharton as my model. You can pick up her work and you don't have to struggle. You don't feel it's antiquated or at least  I don't. 

AMY: Well, yeah, we gained a whole new respect for translators last year when we did an episode on Helen Tracy Lowe Porter, who translated pretty much all the works of Thomas Mann from German into English. And so she came to my mind a lot and I was thinking about you, Stephanie, so much as I was reading this novel because I just kept thinking, gosh, this is a huge undertaking. Huge. And you accomplished it so well. 

STEPHANIE: Thank you so much. It actually was an honor to do it. I felt each and every time I sat down to work that, um, I was kind of in an elevated state. 

AMY: Like you were transported or something. Yeah. Listeners, we’re giving this book, Red House Alley, our rave review. You know, Kim and I tell it like it is. I think even though it is long, I do think this book would be very interesting for book clubs to read and discuss because there's just so much food for thought on every page, like about how society works, you know, gender, class that all comes up in this book. Religion, I mean all the Jewish stuff. We didn't even have time to even begin to dive into 

STEPHANIE: A lot of Yiddish. 

AMY: Yeah, yeah.

KIM: Stephanie, your translation is brilliant, so we are just so honored to have you on to talk about this. It's amazing to have been able to read this book and to have you to discuss it with.

STEPHANIE: Oh, thank you. That's reciprocal. I'm so delighted to meet you both. Your work is just really, um, moving. 

AMY: And especially knowing how Else ended up in a psychiatric hospital when she died. It feels more important than ever that this book is available and that we're talking about it again. What a great book. 

KIM: I feel like it's such an important historical document, even as fiction, but just the way that she digs into this world and all the intricacies of it, it's hugely important to have this. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. As we mentioned at the top of the show, we'll be taking a summer break from recording, but we'll be working hard prepping for this fall. We encourage you to go back to previous episodes you haven't heard yet, and give those a listen. We'll also be putting out a couple of bonus episodes each month for a nominal fee. You can purchase any of our bonus episodes individually, or you can sign up to contribute monthly for less than the price of a latte. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.