Reading and Writing Women: Minority Discourse in Feminist Jewish Literary Studies

In Jewish literary studies, we are only just beginning to locate the women within a male literary culture, to distinguish between silence and repression, between women's absence and women's marginalization. At the same time, the study of images of women as opposed to men or the identification and documentation of literature produced or read by women as opposed to that produced or read by men have come to be understood as passé lines of inquiry in the field of women's studies. Is it possible as scholars of Jewish literature to ask the kinds of questions that women's studies scholars have already stopped asking while still maintaining the sophistication and nuance that contemporary gender studies have to offer? Is it possible to understand women as a minor voice within Jewish literary studies without falling into the trap of isolating those voices in monolithic opposition to the presumably male voices of their contemporaries?

Feminism has turned, in recent years, toward the contemplation of its own blind spots, its own assumptions of essential similarity between women regardless of sexual or religious orientation, geographic location, race, and socioeconomic status. As they struggle to locate a starting point for feminist discourse that neither essentializes all women as "oppressed" vis-à-vis men nor, for that matter, assumes that women are univocal or unified, scholars in the field have moved toward theorizing the differences among women. Susan Stanford Friedman, for example, develops the notion of "borders" as critical loci of feminist discourse because, while borders "enforce silence, miscommunication, [and] misrecognition, they also invite transgression, dissolution, reconciliation and mixing."¹ Friedman states: "In an increasingly globalized and transnational context, feminism has become ever more acutely attuned to the meanings of borders as markers of positionality and situatedness."

In a similar vein, the 2002 title of an international conference in women's studies at the University of Maryland was "Theories and Practices of Difference and Commonality." Contemporary feminism, in other words, seeks to identify the commonalities not in the differences, but despite the acknowledged differences between women.

Three recent studies of women's writing and reading in Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish, and other languages from the eighteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century have joined a slowly growing field of Jewish feminist literary studies. These works, by Wendy Zierler, Carole Balin, and Iris Parush, are important contributions to a surprisingly new field. Since the 1970s, literary feminism has been producing important works, such as Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and Alicia Ostriker's Stealing the Language (1986), but studies of modern Jewish literature written from a feminist perspective or about female authors have only gathered momentum since the late 1980s.² Esther Fuchs's Israeli Mythogynies: Women in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction (1987) was among the first in-depth studies of the image of women in Israeli fiction. Founding Mothers, Stepsisters (1991), by Dan Miron, a study of the Hebrew women poets of the 1920s and 1930s in Palestine, was followed in quick succession by two anthologies of essays in English: Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew Literature (1992), edited by Naomi Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich; and Women of the Word (1994), edited by Judith Baskin.³ In addition to an interesting mix of essays on Hebrew and Yiddish women writers, Gender and Text offers several excellent annotated bibliographies: one on Jewish women's literary production in Yiddish and one on Jewish feminist critical literary discourse. Women of the Word focuses on women's writing and on literary images of women throughout a broad historical period and geographic area, beginning in medieval Spain, traversing Eastern and Western Europe from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth century, and touching as well on the contemporary United States. In 1997, Naomi Seidman's A Marriage Made in Heaven offered a broad cultural perspective on the gendering of Hebrew and Yiddish in modern Jewish literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century, and in 1999, Yael Feldman's No Room of Their Own focused on the intersection of gender and nation-building within an Israeli literary context.⁴

Wendy Zierler's And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing, Carole Balin's To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia, and Iris Parush's Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society elaborate on earlier models of criticism-each in its own way. Zierler, for example, follows Miron's lead (as she herself articulates in her introduction) by focusing monolingually on Hebrew women writers. Parush makes broad cultural claims, like Seidman, by employing a wide variety of primary sources most often to be seen in historical works but viewed through the eyes of a literary critic. Balin, a historian by training, focuses on literary women as the first step toward writing a history of women in tsarist Russia. In so doing, she joins scholars such as Paula Hyman and Marion Kaplan in her interest in gender as the untold story of major historical narratives.⁵ What sets Balin apart, however, from her historical forebears as well as from her literary peers is her choice to focus on literary and autobiographical materials while employing strictly historical methodologies. The interdisciplinary, multilingual, trans-geographic nature of these studies, when taken collectively, is a wonderful, trailblazing development in modern Jewish feminist literary criticism. How each stands up to the challenge of resisting a strict hermeneutics of women's monolithic difference from men remains to be seen.

In the introduction to her book And Rachel Stole the Idols, Zierler lays out the particular dilemma faced by feminist literary critics in Jewish studies:

Fundamentally I accept the argument that by attempting to "define women, characterize women, or speak for women," we duplicate the strategies that have always defined misogynist cultures and their assumption of woman as "other." At the same time, I remain committed to feminism as a means of transforming women's lives. Having grown up in an Orthodox Jewish community where women continue to be marginalized both in ritual and law, I cannot entirely accept the idea of "woman" as fictional construct nor relinquish the project of women's (literary) history, especially given the context of Jewish literary studies, where feminist criticism has experienced a belated awakening.

(7)

Zierler's study focuses on what she designates as the first three generations of modern Hebrew women writers, beginning with Rachel Morpurgo (1790-1871) and concluding with Zelda (1914-84). Throughout the book, Zierler struggles valiantly to avoid a strict hermeneutics of difference while acknowledging the special case of women writing in Hebrew during modernity. In close literary analyses of the work of Yokheved Bat-Miriam (1901-80), Rachel Bluwstein (1890-1931), Esther Raab (1894-1981), Anda Pinkerfeld Amir (1902-81), Miri Dor (1911-45), and Leah Goldberg (1911-70), and fiction writers such as Sarah Feige Menkin Foner (1854-1936), Hava Shapiro (1878-1943), Nehama Puhachevsky (1869-1934), and Dvora Baron (1887-1956), Zierler documents what she presents as an attempt "to capture the literary territory of men-to steal the language of the fathers as well as to create works of literature that represent their unique women's perspective on many time-honored themes and communal issues" (11).

Zierler's development of Alicia Ostriker's notion of "stealing the language" is decidedly predicated on a model of Hebrew women writers as marginal to and desirous of the culture of Hebrew men's writing.⁶ Her superbly written and insightful close readings tend to be wholly focused on Jewish female literary reactions to the Jewish male literary establishment. Displaying impressive knowledge of midrash, Bible, and Talmud, Zierler argues for what I have elsewhere termed Hebrew women writers' "alternative erudition" as a backbone for understanding their intimations of "difference" from their male peers.⁷

At times, however, this perspective can be disabling and limiting, as in the case of Zierler's reading of Leah Goldberg's sonnet cycle The Love of Teresa de Meun (1952). In an epigraph to the poem, Goldberg asserts that the cycle is based on the experience of a sixteenth-century French noblewoman who fell in love with a young Italian man-her children's tutor. Goldberg "translates" for us the fictional Teresa de Meun's account of her love. Zierler, in her analysis of this sonnet cycle, asserts that it was written in conjunction with a monograph by Goldberg on Petrarch (1953) and might "therefore be seen as a feminist companion to that volume, offering a glimpse of the unknown contributions women poets might have made to the European sonnet genre" (171). She further, and appropriately, states that "of all Goldberg's poems, 'The Love of Teresa de Meun' is one that concerns itself most with encountering another woman's voice against the surrounding silence of women's literary history" (170). Zierler might have pursued this assertion to its natural conclusion by discussing Leah Goldberg's engagement with the fictional tradition that presents women's literary empowerment through epistolary and poetic accounts of their desire for forbidden men (e.g., Abelard and Heloise, Heroides, Portuguese Letters, Clarissa). Instead, Zierler proceeds to discuss Goldberg's allusions to the Song of Songs throughout this particular cycle.

In other words, Zierler sets herself up for a complex analysis of the cross-linguistic, cross-cultural nature of Goldberg's composition, but she does not fully follow through. Perhaps, instead of looking exclusively for biblical allusions, it might have been interesting to pursue the intersection of the Song of Songs and The Portuguese Letters or Abelard and Heloise implicit in Goldberg's work. Goldberg, the founder of the Department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University, was clearly quite conscious, as both a scholar and a writer, of the potential dialogues between Jewish and other literary traditions. Indeed, as Zierler points out, she translated Chekhov, Ibsen, and Tolstoy into Hebrew, in addition to the sonnets of Petrarch. By moving beyond the Song of Songs in her reading of Leah Goldberg, Zierler might have helped us better identify and understand the particular ways in which Goldberg was in dialogue with literary cultures beyond the Jewish and freed us from Zierler's somewhat restrictive presentation of Jewish women's reading and writing about traditional Jewish texts mediated by a modern male literary tradition.

Despite my reservations about Zierler's placement of modern Hebrew women writers within what at times seems to be a strictly Jewish and gendered framework, And Rachel Stole the Idols makes an important contribution to the field of modern Hebrew literary studies, Jewish studies, and gender studies. Zierler's presentation of modern Hebrew women writers is comprehensive, readable, and clearly motivated by a love for and deep proficiency in her subject matter. In general, Zionism and post-Zionism have dominated contemporary criticism of modern Hebrew literature in the last several years. While Zierler deals appropriately with the role of Zionism in the trajectory of many of the writers she discusses, to my mind she more appropriately focuses on the role of Jewish literary and cultural influences on the development of a modern women's literary voice in Hebrew. Her exemplary mastery of traditional Jewish texts gives Zierler an advantage in modern Hebrew literary studies that is not often found in academic discourse on the modern Jewish experience. Furthermore, her mastery of traditional Jewish texts in what continues to be a male-dominated Orthodox intellectual climate is all the more compelling in light of the particular population of women writers of Hebrew upon whom she focuses her critical lens-women who mastered what was long considered the language of the "fathers."

In To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia, Carole Balin "introduces readers to dozens of Jewish women writers and [focuses] in on five who not only were the most prolific, but also bequeathed personal information, in the form of memoirs, correspondence, autobiographies and diaries found in archives" (11). A professor of history at Hebrew Union College, Balin indicates that her larger goal is to write an all-encompassing history of women in tsarist Russia, but she has focused on women writers here because of the dearth of materials specifically on women in the historical archives. Locating literary works by women is her way of beginning the difficult task of composing a portrait of an underrepresented minority.

Balin's book focuses on the lives and literary production of Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920), Hava Shapiro (1878-1943), Rashel Mironovna Khin (1861-1928), Feiga Izrailevna Kogan (1891-1974), and Sofia Dubnova Erlikh (1885-1986). Markel-Mosessohn and Shapiro wrote in Hebrew, while the others wrote in Russian. Markel-Mosessohn is primarily known for her translation of historical texts into Hebrew and for her correspondence with the well-known Haskalah poet Y. L. Gordon, while Shapiro is known for her small corpus of Hebrew short stories as well as her alliance with the Hebrew writer Reuven Brainin (1862-1939). Khin, a personal friend of Turgenev's, was, according to Balin, "[o]ne of the few Jewish women writing in Russian and one of the few Jews recognized by the Russian literary establishment" (84). Khin was a translator, a fiction writer, and an infrequent journalist who was "eminently qualified to write about the Russian intelligentsia, being herself one of the few Jews accepted into its rarefied ranks in the 1880s until its virtual demise in 1917" (85). Kogan, a Russian symbolist poet, was a close friend and compatriot of the better-known Hebrew writer Elisheva (Zhirkova) Bikhovski, a Christian woman who immigrated to Palestine in 1925. The eldest daughter of the eminent Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (1860-1941), Erlikh was a Russian poet, memoirist, critic, and translator, as well as a Bund activist.

Balin negotiates, as evident in the literary biographies of the women upon whom she focuses, a variety of different genres and a variety of different languages in her study. Her perspective as a historian, unbound by the niceties of genre and language distinction, is one of the strengths of this book. It enables her to move beyond the language wars between Hebrew and Yiddish and beyond the dichotomy of pre- and post-Haskalah literary sensibilities. She does, quite simply and elegantly, what Jewish literary scholarship is only just beginning to do: taking into account the multilingual, trans-geographic, cross-generic nature of modern Jewish cultural and literary production.

Balin helps us to broaden the parameters of modern Jewish studies via gender. Women in this study form a bridge between discourses, periods, and historiographical assumptions. Even so, while a historical orientation can close some of the disciplinary turf lines drawn in literary studies between different languages such as Hebrew as opposed to Yiddish, or Yiddish as opposed to Russian, it can often be disabling in significant ways when the literariness of the source texts is overlooked. Particularly when women are used as an index of the delicate balance in Jewish modernity between tradition and change, it is important to distinguish between manifestos and metaphors. What an author declares to be true about herself or her world is not necessarily to be taken at face value. Unfortunately, in various instances, Balin is too intent on constructing a cultural history of women in tsarist Russia to take into account these distinctions. I noticed this most pronouncedly in her discussion of Miriam Markel-Mosessohn's correspondence with Y. L Gordon. According to Balin, Markel-Mosessohn "was one of many women whose fear of disapprobation caused her to consider withdrawing from the official literary scene" (36). She substantiates this observation with a quotation from one of Markel-Mosessohn's letters:

Tradition dictates that women support the household and raise children. . . . They may read good books, but they may not write and publish them. I have violated the law by dressing like a man. Who knows whether a crowd of people will gather and strip this garment from me. And then, what will be the fate of my work?⁸

While Balin correctly refers us to the biblical injunction of Deut. 22:5 ("woman shall not wear that which pertains to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment") as the basis of Markel-Mosessohn's allusion, she incorrectly understands Markel-Mosessohn to be expressing a kind of pious concern and anxiety about her identity as a woman writer. On the contrary, there is an edge to this remark, a statement of defiance. Particularly during the latter period of the Haskalah, when Hebrew writers were beginning to use biblical sources against their own grain for satirical or subversive purposes, it is crucial to consider Markel-Mosessohn's biblical allusion in a similar, artful, vein.

This is further supported by the extreme nature of the image that Markel-Mosessohn invokes in expressing concern that her "garment" will be "stripped" from her. Markel-Mosessohn makes an oblique allusion here to the married woman in the Torah who is suspected of infidelity, the sotah whose hair is uncovered and is forced to drink water into which God's name inscribed on a piece of parchment has been dissolved. If she is guilty of infidelity, the sotah's stomach explodes; if she is innocent, she returns to her husband and bears sons. This biblical scenario can loosely be read as a metaphor for the social dangers inherent in women "imbibing" God's language, Hebrew. Evocative, in a subversive vein, of the well-known statement of Rabbi Eliezer that if you teach your daughter Torah, you have taught her "licentiousness," Markel-Mosessohn's statement to Gordon demonstrates a certain degree of ironic alarm over the sexualization or even eroticization of Hebrew authorship in modernity. Instead of understanding Markel-Mosessohn's statement as, "Oh dear, I am doing the wrong thing. I may be revealed and humiliated," it may be more appropriate, in the context of the network of allusions she invokes in just two sentences, to understand her statement as a question: "Why should I be treated like a licentious daughter or an unfaithful wife because I write in Hebrew?"

Balin earlier acknowledges Markel-Mosessohn's well-documented reaction to the hyperbolic preface that Y. L. Gordon prepared for her translation of The Jews and the Crusades under Richard the Lionhearted, by Eugen Rispart (Isaac Asher Frankholm, 1788-1849).⁹ In his preface, Gordon holds forth about the "worth" of women writers, asserting "the only difference between the sexes is physical."¹⁰ Markel-Mosessohn edits several of his more laudatory comments from the published preface and remarks on her omissions in a letter to Moshe Hacohen Prozer: "I will not announce the hidden objects of my heart in the streets and within earshot of all. I will not open the eyes of the blind . . . for not everything said between a man and his friend ought to be a matter of public record."¹¹ Markel-Mosessohn is not piously hesitant, as Balin claims. Hers is not a concession to silence as much as it is a cry for anonymity; she doesn't want to be declared an exemplar. In her reading of Markel-Mosessohn's statement to Gordon, Balin sees concession when, in fact, subversion is in order.

In a recent conference entitled "Jewish Literature and History: An Interdisciplinary Conversation," at the University of Maryland, a series of scholars explored the interplay of the two disciplines in the field of Jewish studies.¹² The powerful connection between literary texts and historical narratives, between historical concerns and literary resources, is not unique to modern Jewish scholarship. However, for cultures undergoing revolutionary transition or cataclysmic trauma, as did Eastern European Jewish culture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary resources become even more historically valuable. As we know from the activities of YIVO, the location and restoration of extant materials that survived the Holocaust are only a scratch on the surface of all the documents, artifacts, and materials that were destroyed. For that matter, the dislocations of World War I and the mass migrations that preceded and followed it all created major ruptures in the institutions and systems of knowledge that we rely upon to understand Jewish life in Eastern Europe during modernity. Balin sets an important precedent for the mining of literary texts and declaring them of historical import. She takes risks generally not undertaken by historians (and some literary scholars) in their encounter with literary texts by focusing on content and not just context, by foregrounding the fact that she is working with literary documents. Perhaps as her research progresses and she becomes better acquainted with the vocabulary and discourse of literary scholarship, Balin's sophistication as a reader of history into literary texts will set the tone for increased sophistication of her literary readings.

Iris Parush's Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth Century Eastern European Jewish Society was first published in 2001 in Israel, where it won the prestigious Zalman Shazar Prize for Jewish history that same year.¹³ This study demonstrates the ways in which women's concession to the restrictions on intellectual access imposed upon them for centuries in Eastern Europe enabled them to subvert tradition. As Parush eloquently states: "It was, in fact, the women, those same people who were prohibited from studying Torah and who were expected to remain ignorant of almost any issue of spiritual consequence, who eluded the supervisory system entirely and who were able to act, wittingly or unwittingly, to subvert it" (7).

The history of the Haskalah has most often been understood as a composite portrait of maskilim producing, perusing, and promoting a limited though far-reaching range of literary, philosophical, and scientific texts. Despite the complex network of readers as well as writers implicit in such a model, studies until now have almost without exception focused on the architects and authors of the Haskalah and not on the readers toward whom the cultural reforms were directed and who, in fact, were the most important index of the movement's success or failure. It is important, Parush argues, in considering the history and ideology of the Haskalah, to contemplate not just the role of Hebrew and Yiddish writers but to take into account the population of readers who disseminated, adopted, and modified the values put forth by Haskalah writings. These writings include those published specifically to promote the Haskalah in Jewish languages as well as the values promoted by la'az, or writings in local, European languages such as Russian, Polish, French, and German. Understanding the Haskalah not just in terms of its writers but its readers, not just in terms of the languages directed exclusively toward Jews, opens the discourse to a cross-section of classes, genders, and languages. Within the dangerous theoretical economy of difference, Parush manages to employ, in Chana Kronfeld's terminology, a "kaleidoscopic vision." Parush moves out of the binary categories of reader/writer, male/female, Jewish/non-Jewish, Hebrew/Yiddish most often employed in histories of the Haskalah simply by positing the necessity to consider them all simultaneously and encompassing them within a larger European linguistic and literary frame that transcends the exclusively Jewish.¹⁴

One of Parush's greatest strengths as a theorist of reading Jewish women is the nuance in her argumentation. For example, she does not understate the radical nature of the establishment of Hebrew language schools for women throughout Russia in the nineteenth century, but at the same time she reminds us that "the calls to grant women a share of the cultural sphere of men and to teach them Hebrew and Judaism" were also an attempt to bring them under the supervision of men (202). In no way, she argues, are we to understand the "liberality" of the rabbinic establishment vis-à-vis women's reading freedom as a sign of female entitlement. Neither are we to see the Haskalah movement to introduce women to the rudiments of Jewish culture as a sign of respect. On the contrary, both moves were a subversion of women's intellectual freedom. In the first case, women were kept out of the intellectual economy of Jewish knowledge, authority, and autonomy. In the second, they were introduced to Judaism and its texts in order to keep their secularization (a result of their reading beyond the Jewish sphere) in check. For their part, Parush makes clear, women were resistant on both ends-first to their enforced intellectual impoverishment in the Jewish sphere, and then to their circumscribed reintegration into Jewish intellectual life.

Parush, a professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University, uses literary texts, autobiographies, memoirs, correspondence, and periodicals as her primary source materials. While she does an exquisite job of refining an understanding of the role that a large network of readers played in determining the direction of the Haskalah, Reading Jewish Women is clearly the historical work of a literary scholar. For better or for worse, scholars who engage in interdisciplinary work must very clearly delineate their thematic focus in such a way that a certain amount of overdetermination often takes place. In Parush's case, her focus on gender obscures some of the more particular historical questions that may arise out of a study with as broad a temporal and geographic scope as hers. For example, she doesn't seem to make much of an effort to locate the dynamics that she discusses. Where exactly in Eastern Europe are we throughout the period specified? There were undoubtedly huge differences in reading demographics based on where these readers were located, as has been demonstrated by Shmuel Feiner in his study of women as readers in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹⁵

Another important question is: How could Parush have grappled more strenuously with issues of class in order to give us a better sense of all "readers" in this discourse-men as well as women? Finally, Parush, as a literary scholar, pays surprisingly little attention to the literary aspects of most of the sources that she employs. Her use of memoirs, or even the marginalia of memoirs, as her historical source and the basis of her cultural analysis is acknowledged and unapologetic. Even so, she doesn't do what one would expect a literary scholar to do in many cases with these texts: closer readings and more articulated cognizance of conventions that may affect the historical or documentary value of certain narratives.

While Zierler and Balin tend to remain methodologically faithful to their respective disciplines-Zierler performing literary analysis and Balin staking out historical territory-Parush's perspective is more cultural in scope. It aims at reconceiving the Haskalah. Balin and Zierler, like Parush, introduce women into already well-known literary maps-Zierler the modern Hebrew one, and Balin the Russian Jewish one. But Balin and Zierler do not, like Parush, redefine the fields that they penetrate, and in so doing they remain wedded to the idea that Jewish women's literary culture must be understood in a minor key. Parush, on the other hand, proposes a major role for what has hitherto been considered a minor phenomenon; women's reading patterns during the Haskalah, according to her, were not just a product of the Haskalah but defined it and dictated its progress in important ways.

Balin and Zierler aim more modestly than does Parush-Zierler to reexplore the poetics of Hebrew women writers as they distinguished themselves from the predominantly male Hebrew literary establishment, and Balin to pave the way for a history of women in tsarist Russia. Both Balin and Zierler, in other words, maintain the premise that women writers are a minor phenomenon within a patriarchal literary and intellectual culture, and while they deserve more exposure historically (as Balin demonstrates) or a more thoughtful and systematic literary approach (as Zierler demonstrates), they remain, for all intents and purposes, marginal. Indeed, the fact of women's marginality in traditional Jewish intellectual and literary culture had an unmistakable impact on the culture of the Haskalah and Jewish modernity. The difference between Zierler's, Balin's, and Parush's approaches, however, can best be discerned in their presentation of women's minority status in Jewish literary culture as an immutable fact or, in contrast, as the seed of revolution. As both Parush and Zierler point out in the conclusions to their books, we are, indeed, moving toward something of a revolution in Jewish letters. They bring as evidence the fact that Amos Oz looks toward the Hebrew poet Zelda as a literary model and that Amalia Kahana-Carmon can discuss Israeli literature in terms of women's liberation from the "women's section of the synagogue." I hope that this new generation of critical works on Jewish women's literary culture, in addition to posing the kinds of questions and providing the kinds of tools necessary for a reconsideration of canons and cultures long ossified, can foster a deeper understanding of the breadth and the depth of Jewish women's reading and writing lives throughout Jewish modernity.