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The Portrayal of the Jewish Shtetl in Dvora Baron's Sunbeams

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The Portrayal of the Jewish Shtetl in Dvora Baron's Sunbeams Dvir Abramovich Resurrecting a long-vanished diaspora: The Portrayal of the Jewish Shtetl in Dvora aron!s Sunbeams Regarded as the first modern Hebrew female author, this essay contends that what set Dvora Baron apart from the male-dominated prose of the period, was her probing of the east-European Shtetl, rather than the Zionist pro ect. Through the e#amination of Baron$s short story %Shavririm&, this essay probes Baron’s vivid depiction of the Shtetl, as well as offering a scathing criti'ue of the community’s treatment of the heroine( an orphaned girl who overcomes emotional and physical hardships to emerge as a noble, triumphant figure. )n her corpus, Baron betrayed a subversive strand of writing that focused on the Jewish women’s e#perience and gendered traumas in a patriarchal society. "#TR$DUCT"$# Often hailed as the first modern female Hebrew author and the, “only female Hebrew prose writer known to have emerged from the Shtetl milieu in the last century,” 1 Dvora Baron was born in O dha, near !insk, Belorussia in "##$% Her father Shabtai Elie er, a Hassidic rabbi, recognized his daughter's artistic genius early on and gave her the rabbinic education usually reserved for boys% (s has been observed, Baron was fortunate in having an e)traordinary father who had a radical and generous approach to his gifted daughter's education%2 *hile her father conducted classes in the study hall for the boys, the young girl, ensconced in the woman's section, would occasionally shout a +uestion to her father or brother through the partition%3 ,aomi Seidman cites from a study by ,urit -ovrin, a renowned Baron scholar, in further e)plicating the confluence of circumstances that enabled the young woman to obtain an education in .almud and !idrash/ .he rare combination of understanding parents, a brother who was also a spiritual guide, and a girl who was blessed with talents, eager for learning and iron0willed, was what made possible the very e)istence of a rabbi's daughter becoming a Hebrew0writer, for whom knowledge of Hebrew and grounding in the religious sources were natural and primary% .he way for her to ac+uire the 1ewish0Hebrew education normally given to a boy was to make a necessary compromise, which allowed her to receive an education without seriously overthrowing accepted social convention%4 1 (dler, 2uth/ Dvora Baron: Daughter of the Shtetl, in: Baskin, 1udith 2% 3&d.4/ *omen of the *ord: 1ewish *omen and 1ewish *riting% Detroit/ "556, p% 57% 2 For several excellent studies about Dvora Baron’s corpus and life, see 1elen, Sheila &%9:insker, Shachar 3&d.4/ Hebrew, -ender, and !odernity/ ;ritical 2esponses to Dvora Baron’s Fiction. Bethesda, !aryland: 7<<$= Seidman, ,aomi/ Baron >in the ;loset'/ (n &pistemology of the >*omen’s Section,' in: Seidman, ,aomi%/ ( !arriage !ade in Heaven: .he Sexual :olitics of Hebrew and ?iddish% Berkeley/ "55$, pp% @$A"<"= Bieblich, (mia/ ;onversations with Dvora/ (n &xperimental Biography of the First !odern Hebrew *oman *riter% Berkeley/ "55$= 1elen, Sheila% &%/ Cntimations of Difference/ Dvora Baron in the !odern Hebrew 2enaissance% Syracuse, ,ew ?ork/ 7<<$% 3 Seidman, Baron >in the ;loset,' pp% @$A@#% 4 Seidman, Baron >in the ;loset,' p% @#% Dvir Abramovich: Resurrecting a long-vanished diaspora: The Portrayal of the Jewish Shtetl in Dvora Baron’s Sunbeams. " Medaon 11 (2017), 20 – URL: http://www.medaon.de/pdf/Medaon_20_Abramovich.pdf Baron wrote a ?iddish play at the age of seven and began writing Hebrew stories that first appeared in "5<D in the maga ine Hamelit+ and later in the daily Hat+fira% !arking the emergence of a sterling literary career at a time when, “the very e)istence of a woman writing Hebrew fiction was an anomaly,”5 she achieved wide acclaim among Hebrew authors of the time, as eminent author Hayyim Brenner wrote in a "5<@ letter/ “!y sister you can write%”6 *ith the encouragement of her parents, she moved to the city of !insk with her brother Binyamin, who was a medical student, to complete her high school education% .here, she was for a time engaged to the author !oshe &lie er% (fter the couple ended their relationship, the Baron family immigrated to :alestine in "5""% Cn "5"" she married ?osef (hronovit , a leading figure in the Babor Eionist movement and editor of the weekly Hapoel Hat+air 3.he ?oung *orker), whom she met in her role as editor of the paper's literary supplement% .heir daughter . iporah was born in "5"F, the same year that the couple was deported to (le)andria, Egypt, under orders from the Ottoman authorities% .he young family was to remain there for four years before returning to .el (viv. .heir soGourn in Egypt formed the basis for the novel Hagolim 3"he E#iles, "5$<), published "6 years after her death% Shaken by the death of her brother from typhus after the 8irst *orld *ar, and devoted to caring for her epileptic daughter, for the ne)t thirty years, Baron did not leave her .el (viv apartment, not even to attend her husband's funeral in "5D$, though she did edit his collected works% Shattered by her brother's death and suffering from an illness, she was bedridden, yet continued to write, edit the newspaper Hapoel Hat+air until December "577 when she and her husband resigned from that post, and to translate masterpieces such as 8laubert's ,adame Bovary% Cntensely involved in public life, her first collection of stories, Sippurim 3Stories), was published in "57$% Sara 2% Horowit draws parallels between the author's name and what we know of her own life/ Baron spelled her last name in the ?iddish rather than the Hebrew manner, with the letter aleph following the bet. Bater readers HIJwould note the unintended punning created by this spelling, of Baron with ba'aron, in the closet. .his play on words encapsulates her life, which she lived out literally as a recluse in the confines of her apartment for several decades, as well as the fate of her writing, metaphorically, in the closet, unread and underappreciated until recently%7 .he first recipient of the Bialik :rize in "5D6 (she won the award twice), she also received the 2upin :ri e for her novel -e-et .ta 3For the "ime Being "5D64 and the Brenner :rize for 0arashiyot 31hapters "5F"4% Dvora Baron died in .el (viv on (ugust 7<, "5F@% (lthough Baron lived in :alestine and saw firsthand the upheavals and dislocation of settlement and Csraeli statehood, she chose to anchor her portraitures in the Bithuanian small town% *endy Eierler e)plains that, “Baron's fiction seems perennially and statically rooted A as if outside time A in a mythified version of the Shtetl, ensconced within its sacred te)ts and genealogies%”8 Bikewise, 2ivka -orfine suggests that Baron felt 5 1elen, Sheila &%9:insker, Shachar/ Cntroduction, in: Hebrew, -ender and !odernity, pp% DA"D, here p% F 6 :agis, (da 3&d.4/ Dvora Baron: !ivchar !a-amarim al ?eti rata% .el (viv "5$6, p% "5#% 7 Horowit , 2% Sara / Koices of 1ewish *omen. ;anadian 1ewish ,ews 3"D September 7<<"4, n.p% 8 Eierler, *endy/ Cn *hat *orld? Devorah Baron’s Fiction of &xile% :rooftexts "5 3!ay "5554, pp%"7$A"F<, here p% 7#% Dvir Abramovich: Resurrecting a long-vanished diaspora: The Portrayal of the Jewish Shtetl in Dvora Baron’s Sunbeams. 7 Medaon 11 (2017), 20 – URL: http://www.medaon.de/pdf/Medaon_20_Abramovich.pdf compelled, berthed amidst the ebullience and rapture that enveloped those involved in the creation of a Jewish state, to unmoor herself from her current reality and create a separate narrative of a long0vanished Diaspora% .hus, -orfine opines that Baron knew that/ [a] day will come when we will retrace our steps and e)plore our roots of yore% (nd perhaps for that very reason her contribution within the revolutionary enterprise of her contemporaries is so special HIJ here, within the flurry of building anew, of forming a city from the sands, she kept depicting all that we, and she, had abandoned% .hrough a uni+ue and individual lens, utilizing delicate power and an almost lyrical beat, she erected a monument to the past—for the generations to come%9 .his choice, to guy her stories and core subject0matters in the Jewish0Bithuanian milieu, was not an easy one, especially since the maGority of the male authors of her generation A some of who came from Eastern Europe A sought to break with religious tradition in their narratives, rather than embrace and adumbrate the life of small-town Jewish folk% Cndeed, Baron's “HIJ thematics, her patterns of interte)tuality and her treatment of popular e)pectations” sharply diverged from those of her colleagues% 1 .hough Baron was ridiculed for honoring Jewish tradition and pressured by her fellow writers to fix her literary ga e on events in the ?ishuv, she absorbed their mockery and did not waver%11 .hroughout, she endured the denigration of her peers, and insisted on preserving in her canon the memory of her home and of her father% Ct is worth +uoting at length, the following analysis by ,aomi Seidman about Baron's struggle as a woman author in a male dominated writing fraternity that yearned to Gettison the traditional religious world and locate her tales in the new Jewish settlement in :alestine/ By failing to set her stories in the contemporary Eionist community, Baron actively resisted the most overt of the ideological demands of Hebrew modernism for years after she migrated to &rets0Csrael in "5"" HIJ Baron was marginalized because she continued to write about the diaspora from the very heart of .el (viv HIJ Baron's marginal stance as a woman writer, as a bilingual writer in a militantly monolingual environment, as a chronicler of the diaspora at the heart of Eionist activism, as a modernist whose e)perimentation took directions that were not always identifiable cannot be entirely e)plained by the prejudices of her literary environment.
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