A Woman's Word: Sholem Aleichem's "Genz"

Sholem Aleichem's "Genz" (Geese; 1902) is the monologue of Basia, a trader of geese, who unfolds before her silent listener—a man, apparently a writer—the hardships of her vocation. It is not the "gem story" that she promises to tell, but rather a twisted account with countless detours and digressions. Neither is it, however, a stream of associations generated by a loquacious woman's unruly tongue. The monologue, exuberant until it becomes ferocious, is a farce of fictional storytelling, of literature as a refined and edifying endeavor: a grotesque performance poking fun at the writer-listener, whose bookish language and concepts of the proper have never brushed against the realities of everyday life. Postponing her promised story in order to deliver what appears as a heap of petty anecdotes and guff, Basia produces in her monologue something of her reality—of the suspensions that govern Jewish women's lives and of the compromised language of those who are enmeshed in the web of worldly affairs. "Genz," the raging and vengeful soliloquy, is an attempt to subvert gender hierarchies as they manifest themselves in language by a woman who recognizes her irrevocable exclusion from the sources of symbolic capital.