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Full Description
In Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939, Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging.
Born in the former Russian and Austro‑Hungarian empires and writing from their homes in New York, Poland, and Mandatory Palestine, the authors central to this book—Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel—seized on the freedoms of social revolution to reimagine Jewish culture beyond the traditionally male world of Jewish letters. The societies they lived in devalued women's labor and denied them support for their work. In response, their writing challenged the social hierarchies that excluded them as women and as Jews. As she reads these women, Schachter upends the idea that literary modernity was a conversation among men about women, with a few women writers listening in. Women writers revolutionized the very terms of Jewish fiction at a pivotal moment in Jewish history, transcending the boundaries of Jewish minority identities. Schachter tells their story, and in so doing calls for a new way of thinking about Jewish cultural modernity.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Women, Modernism, and Jewish Modernity
Part I. Aesthetic Authority: The Role of Women as Artists
1. The Disruptive Power of Prose
2. Dreaming of Schiller: Fradel Shtok and Aesthetic Desire
3. Translating Emma Bovary: Dvora Baron and Aesthetic Labor in Palestine
Part II. New Languages for New Collectivities: The Role of Literature in Cultural Identity
4. The Minority Literature Question
5. Leah Goldberg's Orientalist Bind
6. Elisheva Bikhovsky's Minority Cosmopolitanism
7. Dvora Fogel's Montage Democracy
Conclusion: Grace Paley as the Legacy of Hebrew and Yiddish Women's Modernism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
