From an Old World to a New Language: Eastern European-Born Israeli Women's Writing in Hebrew

Malkah Shapiro. The Rebbe's Daughter: Memoir of a Hasidic Childhood. Translated with an introduction and commentary by Nehemia Polen. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002. Pp. xlviii + 253.

Dvora Baron. "The First Day" and Other Stories. Translated by Naomi Seidman with Chana Kronfeld. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xxv + 236.

Zelda. The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems. Translated with an introduction by Marcia Falk. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004. Pp. xv + 270.

I have long wondered whether there is an argument to be made for a unique Hebrew literary canon of Eastern European–born women writing in Israel. Leah Goldberg (1911–70) and Dvora Baron (1887–1956) are just two examples of such women who helped define modern Hebrew literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Each in her own way brought her European heritage into the Israeli literary scene—Goldberg, a secular cosmopolitan literary sensibility, and Baron a traditional Jewish one. In contemplating a conceptual framework for the unique linguistic and thematic contributions of Eastern European–born women to Israeli literary culture, however, I would, implicitly, be acknowledging the role of biographical history in my reading of literary texts; I would be privileging places, languages, and cultures of origin in my mapping of Israeli literary history.

Three recent English translations of Hebrew literary works written by Eastern European–born women in Israel provide a good starting point for an interrogation of the uses and abuses of historical, biographical, and gendered contextualization of an author's literary oeuvre. Interestingly, translation is an ideal medium through which to gauge the optimal sensitivity to contextual consciousness when interpreting a literary text; translation can serve as an example to critics and other readers for what to do, and what not to do, in contextually mediating a literary work. The first of these works is Malkah Shapiro's novel The Rebbe's Daughter. The second is Dvora Baron's collection of short stories "The First Day" and Other Stories, and the third The Spectacular Difference, a poetry collection by Zelda (Zelda Schneurson Mishkhovsky).

Malkah Shapiro (1894–1971) was the fifth of seven children born to Brachah Twersky and her husband Rabbi Yerahmiel Moshe Hapstein (1860–1909), the incumbent Rebbe of Kozienice. From 1943 to 1971 she published five books of Hebrew poetry and prose in Israel, where she had settled in 1926.¹ Shapiro's 1969 publication Mi-din le-rahamaim: Si-purim me-hatserot ha-admorim (From Justice to Mercy: Tales from Hasidic Courts) was her most ambitious and generically most ambiguous book. Mi-din le-rahamim is presented by Polen in his English introduction to the book as an astonishing insider's perspective on the Hasidic court of Kozienice, a community fifty miles southeast of Warsaw. It encompasses the eleventh and twelfth years of its young protagonist's life as she prepares for her betrothal and marriage to her first cousin. In The Rebbe's Daughter we observe the cycle of prayer, ritual observances, holiday preparations, and meditations that punctuate life in a small, wealthy Hasidic court on the eve of the Russian Revolution.

Nehemia Polen, in a discussion of the genesis of his translation of Shapiro's text, tells us that when he first discovered it on the dusty shelves of a used book store in Jerusalem, he had been working on a collection of Hasidic homilies written by a rabbi named Kalonymous Kalmish Shapiro in the Warsaw Ghetto. After having completed a cursory reading of Malkah's book, Polen realized that she was the sister-in-law of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalmish Shapiro. He decided that Malkah's text would serve as a valuable complement to the work he was already doing and that it would bring to bear, in his own words, a valuable "woman's perspective on Hasidism at the start of the twentieth century" (p. xi...