Meant to Be and Other Stories

As a writer, Shira Gorshman is most notable for her unflinching examination of women's lives, and her willingness to dwell on uncomfortable emotions. Her lean storytelling style foregrounds the moral quandaries her characters face. Her writing is plain-spoken, unembellished, even blunt. Her characters are also straightforwardly who they appear to be. In Gorshman's text, everything is about the situation, the event, the interplay of right and wrong, and the characters' reactions to them. Gorshman's stories follow the trajectory of 20th-century Jewish life in Eastern Europe: from the Lithuanian shtetl to the Russian Revolution, through the kibbutz and collective farms, to Central Asia during wartime and back to mid-century Soviet life.

As a writer, Shira Gorshman is most notable for her unflinching examination of women's lives, and her willingness to dwell on uncomfortable emotions. Her lean storytelling style foregrounds the moral quandaries her characters face. Her writing is plain-spoken, unembellished, even blunt. Her characters are also straightforwardly who they appear to be. In Gorshman's text, everything is about the situation, the event, the interplay of right and wrong, and the characters' reactions to them. Gorshman's stories follow the trajectory of 20th-century Jewish life in Eastern Europe: from the Lithuanian shtetl to the Russian Revolution, through the kibbutz and collective farms, to Central Asia during wartime and back to mid-century Soviet life.

Shira Gorshman (1906–2001) was born in Krakes, Lithuania. Raised partly by her grandparents due to her family's poverty, she became self-supporting and independent at a young age. In 1924, she went with her first husband to Palestine to become part of a communal labour group which attempted to live out their socialist ideals through the Zionist movement. When this group splintered, Gorshman went with the more radical branch to Crimea, taking her young children with her. Living on a communal farm in Crimea for several years, she came into contact with official visitors including the artist Mendel Gorshman. They married and she and her children returned with him to Moscow. At that point, with encouragement from her husband's circle of artistic and literary friends, she began to write. Her stories were published in Soviet and Polish Yiddish periodicals, and she had several collections and novels published. After the death of her husband, and her children's emigration, she followed them to Israel. Arriving in Israel in 1990 in her mid-eighties, she nonetheless energetically produced new stories and books until her death in 2001, as well as republishing many of her Soviet-era stories, which were otherwise not available in Israel.