Unraveling the Yarn: Intertexuality, Gender, and Cultural Critique in the Stories of Dvora Baron

This article examines Dvora Baron's prolonged attention to the east European shtetl, and her intertextual strategy, by which she makes broad, sophisticated use of rabbinic and other traditional Jewish texts. It does so though a critical reading of three texts from various stages of her career: the two versions of the story "Genizah" (Burying the books, 1908 and 1922), and the story "Gilgulim" (Transformations, 1938). I argue that Baron's turn to the world of the shtetl, as well as to rabbinic intertexts, is not, as many critics have argued, a turn towards the limited, marginal space that the patriarchal establishment designated for her. Rather, her ostensibly traditional conventions serve, paradoxically, as an important element in the creation of a female writing strategy, which she used to express cultural, social, and gender critique of the Zionist project of nation-building, and of some of its canonical models of literary expression.