From Bourgeois Germany to Palestine: Memoirs of German Jewish Women in Israel

This article is concerned with autobiographical writing by Jewish women who emigrated from Germany to Eretz Israel in the 1920s and 1930s. It presents a number of test cases and analyzes them both within the broader context of German Jewish autobiographical writing and from the point of view of gender. Aspects of the women’s writings considered here include their intended audience (which often was, first and foremost, the family circle), their focus on daily-life issues, their authors’ involvement in communal and public life, and the “relational” perspective that, according to some scholars, informs women’s self-writing.