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.