Men Reading Women: Gender, Secularism, and Literary Modernity in the Writings of Abraham Cahan and Sholem Aleichem

Abstract:This essay argues that women's active participation in modern Jewish culture shaped modern Jewish masculinity. I examine this phenomenon by looking at how women figured in the writings of Jewish men as symbols of a new cultural modernity, showing how male writers orient themselves in relationship to women. The article focuses on the works of two well-known and popular writers, Abraham Cahan (1860–1951) and Sholem Aleichem (1856–1916), one American and the other Russian, who played important roles in shaping Yiddish culture as writers and literary gatekeepers. Reading their works, the essay shows how they represent and identify with their female protagonists, whose acts of reading open new modern social and political vistas. In Cahan's "The Imported Bridegroom" (1898) and Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman, published serially between 1896–1914, young female protagonists read European novels that propel them to rebel against arranged marriages with Jewish Talmud scholars, and in doing so, they challenge the patriarchal authority of traditional Jewish texts and their male interpreters. In the place of this authoritative textual tradition, the female protagonists embrace the novel as a secular authority on everyday life. Reading these works, I illuminate how male writers' portrayal of Jewish women's desires articulate their own vexed relationships to a changing literary culture that included women.