Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 by Allison Schachter (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 by Allison Schachter Naomi Brenner Allison Schachter. Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. 230 pp. In 1919, according to Yiddish literary lore, the Yiddish writer Fradl Shtok stormed into the office of the New York Yiddish daily Der tog and confronted her colleague Aaron Glanz-Leyeles. Glanz-Leyeles, an influential poet and editor, called Shtok’s first collection of short stories monotonous. Shtok, so the story goes, slapped Glanz-Leyeles across the face and then disappeared from the Yiddish literary scene, never to publish again. Yiddish critics summed up her brief literary career as a promising woman writer undone by hysteria and suggested that she died not long after. But rumors of Shtok’s death were premature, as Allison Schacter explains in Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939. The fact that this talented writer was “killed off” decades before she actually died, Schacter argues, “is proof that we do not know enough about Yiddish women writers” (30). The book analyzes the experiences and texts of Shtok and four other early twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew women writers: Devora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel. Bringing these writers together highlights the systemic challenges that women writers encountered in attempts to find literary acclaim and financial stability across languages and geographic locations. Schachter’s book, however, is not about the failure of these writers to find secure footing in Yiddish and Hebrew literary cultures. Rather, she aims to “rewrite the narratives of Jewish modernity from their perspectives and rethink modern Jewish experience through their eyes” (174). To do so, she explores the writers’ innovations in modernist prose in the context of the devaluation of women’s labor, both domestic and artistic, by a Jewish culture dominated by men. A key term throughout the book is “aesthetic labor,” which is a concept that proves fruitful [End Page 467] in analyzing texts ranging from realist short stories to fragmented prose montages. Schacter draws on recent scholarship on modernism, feminism, and Marxism to argue that aesthetic engagement can be read as a form of labor, particularly in the context of the exploitation of women’s artistic voices. This linkage between the social forces of marginalization and women’s aesthetic projects serves as a common thread in her analysis of the literary work of these five writers. Women Writing joins a growing corpus of recent books on women’s Yiddish and Hebrew literature (e.g., Hellerstein 2014, Merin 2016, Kelman 2018). Remarkably, it is the first monograph to examine early twentieth-century women’s prose in Hebrew and Yiddish together, as part of a multilingual and transnational Jewish culture. The book’s focus on women’s prose balances the tendency within scholarship to focus on women’s poetry, long considered to be more “appropriate” for women writers. It also provides a conceptual counterpart for the many recent translations of women’s fiction from Yiddish, and to a lesser degree, Hebrew (see, e.g., Blankenstein 2022, Karpilove 2022, Shapiro 2014, Shtok 2021, Vogel 2020). Women’s prose, Schacter argues, “experimented with and opened a new possibility for imagining Jewish futures and shape an emerging secular Jewish culture. Women writers explored the intersection between labor and aesthetics, envisioned nonnational forms of cultural belonging, and sought to break down rising ethnic and national divisions” (8–9). While one of Schacter’s aims is to recover these writers’ “lost vision of Jewish modernist literary possibility” (5), Women Writing is not primarily a recovery project. On a basic level, that is because Schacter has selected five writers who are relatively well known, at least within academic circles, though their prose has often been overlooked. But the book’s main accomplishment is bringing them together; each of the chapters uses theoretically sophisticated close readings of these writers’ short stories and novels to elucidate alternative visions for a modern, secular Jewish culture in which women artists could fully participate. Part I, which includes chapters on Shtok and Baron, examines how these writers assert the place of women artists by claiming women’s domestic experiences as both aesthetic and political. Schacter skillfully teases out intricate dialogues that Shtok...