A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987 by Kathryn Hellerstein (review)

In her fascinating new monograph, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987, Kathryn Hellerstein argues the possibilities of a literary tradition formed by women poets during four centuries of Yiddish poetry writing. Deeply informed by T.S. Eliot’s and Eric Hobsbawm’s notions of tradition, Hellerstein aims to uncover the tradition invented by women and how such a tradition enables women poets to write their poetry. Analyzing in great detail and depth the poems of eighteen women poets, including some who are little known, she teases out the overarching features of their tradition, their concern with Jewish women’s issues and their complex relationships with Yiddish tkhines (prayer poems). In each of the six chapters, she addresses the representation and interpretation of the roles and lifestyle that Judaism assigns to women, the influences of women’s gender and sexuality on their poetic writing, and how women poets change the notion of tradition by their writings.

In Chapter 1, “The Idea of a Literary Tradition,” Hellerstein’s argument begins with stressing the importance of the women poets’ tradition in Yiddish and with a comprehensive study of the anthologies of Ezra Korman, Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (Yiddish women poets: Anthology, 1928), and Moyshe Bassin, the two-volume Antologye: Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye (Anthology: Five hundred years of Yiddish poetry, 1917). Hellerstein points out that in the Old Yiddish literary period (from 1250 to 1500, in Korman’s term), very few verses written by women were published, on account of contemporary male poets’ refusal to admit works by women into the tradition established by men. Korman, who introduced women poets and anthologized their poems, would have a pronounced effect on women’s position in Yiddish literature.

In Chapter 2, “Old Poems in a Modern Anthology,” Hellerstein examines four pre-modern women writers included in Korman’s anthology, Royzl Fishls, Gele, Khane Kats and Rivke Tiktiner, and a fifth poet, Toybe Pan. Hellerstein underlines their connection with traditional Ashkenazi Jewish culture. However, they not only wrote tkhines for women to use in the synagogue and in beseeching God to show mercy toward their communities in tragic times; they also composed poems expressing women’s individuality in the secular world. Their poems, according to Hellerstein, reflect both Jewish women’s piety and the writers’ place in the modern tradition of Yiddish poetry. Their diverse poetic genres laid a sound foundation for modern women poets in Yiddish.

Hellerstein’s close readings also touch on the writing careers and life experiences of women writers. In Chapter 3, “Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland,” she discusses four women’s revolutionary poetry and its relationship to prayer-poems, devoting special attention to Kadya Molodowsky’s early poems published in Kiev and Warsaw. Comparing poems written by Dvore Fogel, Rikuda Potash and Rokhl Korn, Hellerstein points out their avant-garde focus on society and modernity.

Chapter 4, “The Folk and the Book: Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh,” looks at two extraordinary modern voices: Ulinover’s folk poetry in archaic Yiddish and Yakubovitsh’s dramatic monologue on the themes of girlhood, marriage, motherhood, barrenness and widowhood. Hellerstein goes on to explore rebellious poetry by Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin in Chapter 5, “The Art of Sex.” Leaving behind the traditional Jewish women’s writing mode of prayer-poems, Dropkin and Margolin wrote sexual poems, challenging the idea that women should write Jewishness. Margolin even wrote poems about Christianity that refer to gender as well. Did they still write as Jewish writers? Hellerstein’s answer is yes. Their poems against Judaism reflect the Jewish culture upon which they drew. Looking at their rebelliousness in the context of the tradition women writers had followed, Dropkin’s and Margolin’s poems unquestionably add a new perspective to the tradition of Yiddish poetry.

In the last chapter, “Prayer-Poems against History: Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman,” Hellerstein studies poems written by Molodowsky and Tussman in the post-Holocaust period...