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  • Daughters of Sarah: Anthology of Jewish Women Writing in French
  • Paula E. Hyman (bio)
Eva Martin Sartori and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage (eds.) Daughters of Sarah: Anthology of Jewish Women Writing In French. Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier in association with the European Jewish Publication Society, 2006

The interest in women’s experience and writing is still too new to have yielded many collections of women’s self-expression. Nor do general collections of Jewish writing give women their due, particularly when standards of literary significance prevail. Women writing about women are often deemed to be focused on the trivial, and, therefore, few women writers “pass the test” of literary significance.

This splendid collection seeks to remedy that literary amnesia by focusing on works of Jewish women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries writing in French. Though they were not necessarily born in France, all the authors live or lived there, as do the vast majority of Jewish women who write in French (though there are likely a few from Canada or Morocco). The selections, translated into English for this volume, reflect the editors’ focus on the writers’ Jewish identities and their relationship to France. Although the editors have included many genres, from personal letters to newspaper articles and essays, poems, autobiography, short fiction and novels, most of the excerpts are from works of fiction, and most date from the second half of the twentieth century. Only three writers lived and were published in the nineteenth century. This is not surprising, given the obstacles that women faced, especially before the twentieth century, when aspiring to publish their work.

The editors have enabled English readers, undoubtedly unfamiliar with most of these writers—except for the best known, such as feminist theorist Hélène Cixous and philosopher Simone Weill—to place the individual works in a [End Page 239] broader context. A useful brief initial essay discusses the history of the Jews in modern France and the question of whether there is a tradition of Franco-Jewish women’s literature, and each writer is provided a biographical and critical introduction as well as a bibliography of her oeuvre. The selections are long enough to convey both the issues of interest to the writer and her particular style. Dominant concerns among the writers are the shifting, and problematic, nature of Jewish identity and the intersection of gender and Jewishness. The editors also point readers to works not included in this anthology.

What emerges from this collection is the striking diversity of French Jewry. Although the editors suggest that these writers share certain characteristics—a more “visceral” relationship to Jewish identity than that expressed by most Jewish men, a different (but unspecified) approach to Jewish history and culture, an awareness of the specific discrimination they faced as women—Jewish women writing in French are just as varied as their male relatives and concerned with similar issues.

On the eve of the French Revolution, Jews in France were mostly Ashkenazi and Yiddish-speaking, with a small number of Sephardi Jews who were comfortable with French. As Jews born in France acculturated throughout the nineteenth century, French became their mother tongue. Through the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the dissemination of the image of France as the promoter of “liberty, equality and fraternity,” French also became the language of civilization for Jews throughout the Levant. The authors in this volume include Sephardim and Ashkenazim; some trace their lineage to ancestors who lived for generations in Alsace, others to early twentieth-century immigrants from Poland or Salonika. Some are immigrants themselves, especially from Algeria, or post-war refugees from the Holocaust. The writers reflect not only on living in France but also on the societies that they left, willingly or not. The diversity of French Jewry destabilizes the concept of a single French Jewish community, despite the existence of strong communal institutions and a shared realization of the potential danger of anti-Semitism.

Scholars will find this collection valuable for their teaching and research, but this book reaches out to a non-academic audience as well. All readers will be grateful to be introduced to authors who are more than historical curiosities...

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