Henya Pekelman: An Injured Witness of Socialist Zionist Settlement in Mandatory Palestine

Henya Pekelman was born in about 1903 in Markuleshty (Mărculeşti) Bessarabia (then part of the Russian Empire and now in Moldova) and emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1922. Her memoir, Hayey Po’elet Baaretz (The Life of a Worker in Her Homeland or, more accurately, The Life of a Woman Worker in the Homeland) self-published in Hebrew in 1935, follows the events of her life until about 1925. Recently reprinted, it had been ignored over the years.¹ The title indicates that Pekelman wished to place her story within the national context of Zionist socialism and to offer it as representative of the collective experience. The work’s epigraph, “Let your fellow’s honor be as dear to you as your own,” is taken from the midrashic tractate Pirkey Avot (Ethics of the Fathers). As she tells her story it will emerge that Pekelman reads “honor” in a gender-specific denotation that diverges from that of her source: she seeks “revenge against all those who abuse woman’s honor” (2007, 173). Although the Hebrew term for “woman’s honor” itself stems from a patriarchal value system in which to abuse a woman’s honor would mean either hurting a man’s right to ownership or, correlatively, damage to a woman’s possibility of winning protection from a man by exchange of ownership, Pekelman gives the term a different meaning: “a woman’s honor” denotes her own ownership of her body and life.

Pekelman declares at the outset that she is following an inner obligation to defend her honor and feels compelled to break accepted codes in order to do so. “I cannot surrender to the demands of my surroundings and their taste,” she writes (9). Her story stems from a violent affront to her honor: she was raped, became pregnant, and gave birth, and when the child died a month later, she was suspected of murder and finally was left to mourn alone.

Socialist Zionist circles in Palestine of the 1920s propagated a strict sexual code (Biale 1997). Manifestos from the period call for abstinence until the national project might attain a secure foundation. When Pekel-man’s pregnancy was discovered, she was ostracized by her peers for breaking sexual codes. Until her pregnancy came to term, she wandered, seeking odd jobs under a false name. Her intention in her narrative is to clear her name.

The book begins with a poem in which Pekelman compares the exposure of the hidden corner of her heart to the lifting of the curtain (parokhet) that covers the Torah scrolls in the ark in a synagogue.² Thus, Pekelman introduces her testimony as a challenge to male ownership of the truth (in the image of the ark). She insists that her narrative is a straightforward and exact testimony: “I have not omitted from the shadow, nor embellished on the light. Without paint or brush, I have only written about my life” (10). Pekelman describes her narrative as “innocent” and devoid of artifice. At first reading it may seem as such: a narrative written by a woman with a minimal education (her official education was complete when she was eleven).

Beginning with her early childhood, Pekelman depicts herself, whether at school, home, or work, as an innocent victim of cruelty, manipulation, and insult. Her description of her immediate and her extended family reveals violence and emotional abuse, in an exposure rare within the conventions of Hebrew Zionist settlers’ memoirs. As she grows up, she highlights her lack of awareness of sexuality and slight grasp of social norms and codes. She does not understand what the sailor aboard the ship to Palestine wants of her when he approaches her at night on the deck, but her screams awake the other travelers, and he leaves her alone.

Our faith as readers is stretched to its extreme when this portrait of the asexual chaste woman adopts a recognizable cultural pattern: that of a virgin birth that takes place in the Galilee, the Virgin Mary’s home province and the cradle of early...