Women Writing Jewish Modernity 1919 1939

Finalist, 2023 National Jewish Book Award Winners in Women’s Studies 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.

Diasporic Modernisms illuminates the formal and historical aspects of displaced Jewish writers--S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, and others--who grappled with statelessness and the uncertain status of Yiddish and Hebrew.

In Midrash and Theory, David Stern presents an approach to midrashic literature through the prism of contemporary theory. As midrash--the literature of classical Jewish Scriptural interpretation--has become the focus of new interest in contemporary literary circles, it has been invoked as a precursor of post-structuralist theory and criticism. At the same time, the midrashic imagination has undergone a revival in the larger Jewish community and shown itself capable of exercising a powerful influence and hold on a new type of contemporary Jewish writing. Stern examines this resurgence of fascination with ancient Jewish interpretation from the persepctive of the cultural relevance of midrash and its connection to its original historical and literary contexts.

The Translated Jew brings together an eclectic set of literary and visual texts to reimagine the transnational potential for German Jewish culture in the twenty-first century. Departing from scholarship that has located the German Jewish text as an object that can be defined geographically and historically, Leslie Morris challenges national literary historiography and redraws the maps by which transnational Jewish culture and identity must be read. Morris explores the myriad acts of translation, actual and metaphorical, through which Jewishness leaves its traces, taking as a given the always provisional nature of Jewish text and Jewish language. Although the focus is on contemporary German Jewish literary cultures, The Translated Jew also turns its attention to a number of key visual and architectural projects by American, British, and French artists and writers, including W. G. Sebald, Anne Blonstein, Hélène Cixous, Ulrike Mohr, Daniel Blaufuks, Paul Celan, Raymond Federman, and Rose Ausländer. In thus realigning German Jewish culture with European and American Jewish culture and post-Holocaust aesthetics, this book explores the circulation of Jewishness between the United States and Europe. The insistence on the polylingualism of any single language and the multidirectionality of Jewishness are at the very center of The Translated Jew.

An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature examines literary challenges to Israel’s national narratives. The centrality of the army, the mythology of the "new Jew," the vision of the first Israeli city, Tel Aviv, and the very process by which a nation’s history is constructed are confronted in fiction by many prominent Israeli writers. Using the image of suicide, A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Yehudit Katzir, Alon Hilu, Yaakov Shabtai, Benjamin Tammuz, and Yehoshua Kenaz each engage in a critical and rhetorical process that examines the nation’s formation and reconsiders myths at the heart of the Zionist project. In Israeli literature, suicide represents a society’s compulsion to create impossible ideals that leave its populace disappointed and deluded. Yet, as Rachel S. Harris shows, even at their harshest these writers also represent the idealism that helped build Israel as a modern nation-state.

In 2010, when The New Yorker published a list of twenty writers under the age of forty who were “key to their generation,” it included five Jewish-identified writers, two of whom—American Gary Shteyngart and Canadian David Bezmozgis—were Soviet-born. This publicity came after nearly a decade of English-language literary output by Soviet-born writers of all genders in North America. Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction traces the impact of these now numerous authors—among others, David Bezmozgis, Boris Fishman, Keith Gessen, Sana Krasikov, Ellen Litman, Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, and Lara Vapnyar—on major coordinates of the Jewish American imaginary. Entering an immigrant, Soviet-born standpoint creates an alternative and sometimes complementary pattern of how the Eastern and Central European past and present resonate with American Jewishness. The novels, short stories, and graphic novels considered here often stage strikingly fresh variations on key older themes, including cultural geography, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, communism, gender and sexuality, genealogy, and finally, migration. Soviet-Born demonstrates how these diasporic writers, with their critical stance toward identity categories, open up the field of what is canonically Jewish American to broader contemporary debates. This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.

A feminist study of the beginnings of modern Hebrew women's writing.

"A fascinating glimpse into the vital, complex, and often unexpected ways that issues of women and gender shaped the development of the American Yiddish press"--