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Volume 9, No.4 Summer 1991 CANON AND GENDER: WOMEN POETS IN TWO MODERN YIDDISH ANTHOLOGIES1 Kathryn Hellerstein Kathryn Hellerstein is translator and editor of the early poems of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, In New York:A Selection (Jewish Publication Society, 1982). Her articles on Yiddish poetry have appeared in Prooftexts, AJS Review, and Handbook of American-Jewish Literature. Her translations have appeared in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, and Tikkun. Currently she is completing The Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky. She teaches Yiddish literature and language at the University of Pennsylvania. 9 Every literary tradition engages in the making of canons. From Northrop Frye to Harold Bloom, critics have argued that the formation of literary canons is as much a part of literature as the composing of texts. By making a canon, a culture collects those texts that reflect its self-image. It reveals what it considers to be classic and timeless. Simultaneously, the canon asserts authority and teaches the values that the culture wishes to inculcate in its readers. Recent students of canon have also pointed to the political interests involved in the fixing of canons, but political terms alone are inadequate to define a canon, since, in fact, we know that many works actually found in a canon are intrinsically oppositional, taking a stance against the establishment and its values. The question of canon in modern Yiddish poetry is especially interesting. Unlike most other literatures, in which the making of the canon was a gradual process that took place over centuries, in Yiddish culture the making of the canon was telescoped into a few decades. It was an effort that took place at the very moment that the literature was reaching its maturity. So far as I know, however, the word kanon does not appear in the critical works of the period, so that even though the writers and the poets were very 1This article is a revision of a paper presented at the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, in Jerusalem, on August 16, 1989. I am grateful to the Annenberg Research Institute and the Ratner, Miller, Shafran Foundation for generous fellowships supporting my work on Yiddish literature. All translations are mine. 10 SHOFAR much involved in the making of a canon, they did not necessarily think about it in those terms.2 In modern Yiddish literary scholarship, the question of canon has also been treated implicitly by virtually every major academic, and by Avraham Novershtern explicitly in an essay on recent anthologies in translation.3 In this essay, I wish to build upon these earlier writings and to broach the question of canon explicitly in terms of gender, by considering how two early twentieth-century anthologies of Yiddish poetry represent women poets. These two anthologies are M. Bassin's Fin! hundert yor yidishe poezye (Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry), published in New York in 1917, and Ezra Korman's Yidishe dikhterins: antologye (Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology), published in Chicago in 1928.4 By comparing the selection of poems by women in these two works, I will investigate the editors' criteria of inclusion or exclusion and tease out their conceptions of what poetry by women is and where it fits into the Yiddish canon. Bassin's anthology is a monumental collection of poets in Yiddish from 1410 to 1916. The first volume encompasses Yiddish poetry through 1885 and tries to compensate for what the special editor of the Old Yiddish section there, Ber Borokhov, saw as Yiddish poetry's lack of a classical tradition, which he figures as the orphaning of "the Yiddish muse." The second volume represents the modern period, beginning with Morris Rosenfeld and ending with M. Bassin himself. Bassin's general introductory remarks indicate that he intends his anthology to be inclusive and representative of all the kinds of Yiddish poetry. Yet the aim of this anthology to coalesce an available canon for Yiddish poetry has less than a neutral agenda. Going against the strongest ideas of poetry current then, which valued the individualism of the poet, Bassin's anthology embodies an idea of literary tradition that is political and nationalistic. Despite the individuating touches of the apparatus...

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