In Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919 – 1939, Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging.
Born in the former Russian and Austro‑Hungarian Empires and writing from their homes in New York, Poland, and Mandatory Palestine, the authors central to this book — Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel — seized on the freedoms of social revolution to reimagine Jewish culture beyond the traditionally male world of Jewish letters. The societies they lived in devalued women’s labor and denied them support for their work. In response, their writing challenged the social hierarchies that excluded them as women and as Jews. As she reads these women, Schachter upends the idea that literary modernity was a conversation among men about women, with a few women writers listening in. Women writers revolutionized the very terms of Jewish fiction at a pivotal moment in Jewish history, transcending the boundaries of Jewish minority identities. Schachter tells their story and in so doing calls for a new way of thinking about Jewish cultural modernity.
Nonfiction
Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919 – 1939
January 5, 2022
Discussion Questions
This fascinating study demonstrates how female writers of East European origin engaged with literary modernity as women and as Jews. Living in New York, Poland, and Palestine and writing in Yiddish and Hebrew, these authors challenged the male domain of Jewish letters at the same time as they shaped new forms of fiction that “transcended the boundaries of Jewish minority identities.” Allison Schachter convinces us that these literary revolutionaries, including Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel, deserve to be better known, both for the myriad pleasures of their writings and for the central roles they played in bringing women’s voices into the Jewish encounter with twentieth-century culture in the era before the Second World War.
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