A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987

364 Pages·2020·4.332 MB·English

by  Kathryn Hellerstein

A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987
Kathryn Hellerstein
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https://doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9780804756228.001.0001 o
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Published: 2014 Online ISBN: 9780804793971 Print ISBN: 9780804756228 lo
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Copyright Page  o
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https://doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9780804756228.002.0004 Page iv ta
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Published: July 2014 rd
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Subject: Literary Studies (Women's Writing) rs
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© 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. te
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Published with the generous support of the University Research Foundation at the 1
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No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, ity
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University Press. - C
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper el H
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ib
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Hellerstein, Kathryn, author. s u
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A question of tradition : women poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 / Kathryn Hellerstein. r on
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 pages cm—(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture) e
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Includes bibliographical references and index. b
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ISBN 978-0-8047-5622-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 2
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1. Yiddish poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Jewish poetry—Women
authors—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history
and culture.
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A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987
Kathryn Hellerstein
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https://doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9780804756228.001.0001 o
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Published: 2014 Online ISBN: 9780804793971 Print ISBN: 9780804756228 lo
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Dedication  o
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Subject: Literary Studies (Women's Writing) rs
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p. v To the memory of my parents, k
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 Mary L. Feil Hellerstein and Herman K. Hellerstein, 7
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 who taught me the tradition te
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To my husband, 7
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 David Stern, 8
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 with whom I hand down tradition niv
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And to our children, ity
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 Rebecca and Jonah, rth
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A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987
Kathryn Hellerstein
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https://doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9780804756228.001.0001 o
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Published: 2014 Online ISBN: 9780804793971 Print ISBN: 9780804756228 lo
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Acknowledgments  o
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I have been working on A Question of Tradition for some twenty-fve years, and during this period, a number /b
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of foundations have ofered me generous support. The National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship k
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for College Teachers (1987); the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation (1994–1995); the Lucius 2
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N. Littauer Foundation (1994–1995); the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (CAJS) at the /c
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University of Pennsylvania (Penn) (2003 and 2005); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation p
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(1999–2000). I wish to express my deepest appreciation to all of these foundations for their support. r/1
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During this same period, I have also incurred many debts of gratitude to individuals. The �rst group of these 1
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are the Yiddish poets whom I have been fortunate to meet and discuss my work with: the late Malka Heifetz 9 b
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Tussman, my teacher and mentor, who originally gave me the idea for this book; Rivka Basman Ben-Haim; U
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and the late Hadassah Rubin. ive
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I am fortunate to have discussed this project along the way with many people, whose insights and responses o
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kept me going. I thank my friends: Ann Greene, Mimi Gross, Lisa Katz, Rita Mendes-Flohr, Ruby Rain, Carol o
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Vlack, Barbara Von Schlegell, and Linda Zisquit, and the members of the Philadelphia Women Writers Group C
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—Cynthia Baughman, Deborah Burnham, Carolyn Dafron, Ann de Forest, Adele Greenspun, Emily Harting, ro
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Molly Layton, Carolyn Raskin, Karen Rile, and Jeanne Murray Walker. I am deeply grateful to colleagues a - C
around the world who answered my questions or shared their expert knowledge and critical acumen in h
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response to my lectures or essays that comprised earlier versions of parts of this book: Hamutal Bar Yosef, e
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p. x Dan Ben-Amos, S. Z. (Shlomo) Berger, Yael Chaver, Marcia Falk, Robert and Molly Freedman, Amelia ill L
Glaser, Nili Gold, Fern Kant, Natalia Krynicka, Lori Lefkovitz, Catriona MacLeod, Shulamit Magnus, Barbara ibra
Mann, Goldie Morgentaler, Kenneth Moss, Avraham Novershtern, Simon Richter, Lawrence Rosenwald, rie
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David Roskies, Moshe Rosman, Ellen Spolsky, Michael Steinlauf, Karolina Szymaniak, Jefrey Tigay, Liliane s
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Weissberg, Chava Weissler, Beth Wenger, Shira Wolosky, and Sheva Zucker. I especially want to r o
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acknowledge those who read drafts of this work and ofered valuable criticism: Deborah Burnham, Anita 0
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Norich, David Stern, Chava Turniansky, and Bethany Wiggin. My dear friend and teacher John Felstiner ep
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encouraged me in this project over the years; I am extremely appreciative. m
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I continually learn from my students, especially in my course at Penn on women and Jewish literature. I 0
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found particularly valuable responses by the graduate students in the course on women Yiddish poets that I
taught at Columbia in 2007, as well as by the doctoral students in the Department of Germanic Languages
and Literatures at Penn.Parts of this book appeared in earlier forms, as articles, and I am grateful to the
editors of the volumes in which they were published: Lewis Fried; Gabriella Safran and Benjamin Nathans;
and Sheila Jelen, Michael Kramer, and Scott Lerner. D
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I am indebted to Mimi Gross and the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation for fnding and granting me a
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permission to use the beautiful 1927 drawing by Chaim Gross for the cover of this book. d
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The children and families of a number of the poets in this book were of great assistance to me, graciously h
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sharing their memories and knowledge, and encouraging me in my work on the women Yiddish poets. I am s
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deeply grateful to Joseph Tussman (z"l); Ben Litman (z"l); Edith Schwarz; Anne Heilman (z"l); John c
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Dropkin (z"l); and Ruth Dropkin. I am also grateful to Isaac (Ying) Halpern and to the late David Rosenthal, em
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a student of Kadya Molodowsky in Warsaw. .o
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I am indebted to the librarians, archivists, and staf at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; at the Jewish o
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National Library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and especially at Penn’s Herbert D. Katz Center for /sta
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Advanced Judaic Studies, where I benefted tremendously from the expertise of Seth Jershower, Arthur fo
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p. xi Kiron, Judith Leifer, and Bruce Nielsen. I am also grateful to the librarians and staf at the Krauth -s
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Memorial Library at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. ola
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The publication of this book could not have happened without the technical assistance of many people: ip-o
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Tresa Grauer, Kay Kodner, Leslie Rubin, and Gabriella Skwara. I thank the anonymous readers for Stanford lin
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University Press for their constructive criticism, and also press editors Norris Pope and Mariana Raykov. I /b
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am especially and deeply grateful to the academic editors of the Jewish History and Culture series at k/1
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Stanford University Press, Aron Rodrigue and Steven Zipperstein, for their warm support and faith in this 2
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book. /c
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My own family has played a crucial role in the making of this book. Long ago, my late aunt and uncle, Drs. r/1
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Marjorie and Earl Hellerstein, helped me build my Yiddish library. My late in-laws, Dr. Kurt and Florence 7
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Stern, taught me much about traditional Judaism. My siblings, David, Jonathan, Daniel, Susan, and Beth, as 14
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well as their spouses and children, have kept me on track with their humor and companionship. b
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My dedication of this book to my parents, husband, and children speaks for itself. My loving gratitude to iv
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p. xii them is beyond words. rsity
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A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987
Kathryn Hellerstein
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CHAPTER u
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Introduction  o
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Kathryn Hellerstein ta
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Abstract e/b
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The premise of Ezra Korman’s anthology of Yiddish women poets is discussed at length in the /1
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Introduction, and an overview of the rest of the book and its themes are sketched out. Particularly this 5
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chapter looks at the problems his anthology raises about the idea of a tradition of women writers in h
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Yiddish. This volume shows the many discrete strands of tradition in which women poets participated, te
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challenging Korman’s premise of a somewhat monolithic tradition of Yiddish women’s poetry. 7
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Literary culture in Yiddish was never monolithic, but the most prominent and in�uential writers and 6
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critics were men; women writing poetry in Yiddish were often unacknowledged. By studying key 3
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women who wrote poetry from many di�erent perspectives, we can better understand how literary y
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tradition played out its role in modern Yiddish culture. Thus, the poets presented in this book niv
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encompass a range of styles under many in�uences on many subjects. rs
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Keywords: Yiddish, women, poetry, Jewish, tradition, literature rth
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This book is about tradition. But even more than tradition itself, it is about the questions surrounding l H
tradition. The tradition I focus on in this book is that of Yiddish poetry written by women. Yet there are ill L
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many questions pertaining to this particular body of work, including: Do these poems constitute a tradition rarie
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of poetry? Did women poets write with an awareness of creating within or outside of a tradition? And u
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perhaps, most important of all, of what does this tradition consist? And what value or pro�t lies in using it r o
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as a critical category? 2
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As a critical category in modern literary cultures, tradition is ubiquitous. The notions of tradition in both T. p
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S. Eliot’s 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s 1983 b
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book, The Invention of Tradition, have gained wide currency, if not acceptance. Both Eliot and Hobsbawm r 2
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have accustomed us to the understanding that every tradition is invented and serves a purpose. Eliot argues 2
that tradition and modern poetry are mutually dependent: Poetry invents the tradition from which it
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emerges, because the dead inform the living, and the living reformulate the dead. Accordingly, the
traditional writer transcends time by means of a historical sense, and the value of an individual talent is
attributed to its context. The poet, Eliot says, “is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what D
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is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious not of what is dead, but n
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of what is already living.” Hobsbawm provides a broad de�nition of what he calls “invented tradition” as it d
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relates to group or national identity: “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted fro
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p. 2 rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by h
repetition, which automatically implies continuity with … a suitable historic past.”3 ttp
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Concepts of literary and national tradition such as these also pertain to the study of modern Yiddish a
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literature. For example, the Israeli scholar Chone Shmeruk discusses Itzik Manger’s 1935 adaptations of m
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biblical characters in his Khumesh-lider (Bible Poems) in terms of Eliot’s idea of the necessary reciprocity of .ou
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the past and the present in poetry. Shmeruk also identi�es the source of Manger’s reinvented archaic verse .co
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forms: scholarly studies of Old Yiddish literature in the late 1920s. /s
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Eliot’s and Hobsbawm’s notions of tradition deeply inform my discussion throughout this book. Eliot’s rd
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notion of a modern poet’s relation to tradition has led me to ask whether or how texts of Jewish religious ch
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practice, which de�ned women’s roles in Jewish life, are manifest in both Old and Modern Yiddish poetry by la
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women. Hobsbawm’s de�nition of tradition also brings me to the very di�erent question of how poetry ip
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written by women in the twentieth century was received by their male colleagues at the moment when these n
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male poets and critics were inventing a modern tradition for Yiddish literature. In considering these /b
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questions of tradition in Yiddish poetry written by women, I hope to uncover the purposes for which ok
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tradition was invented, how this invention enabled women to write Yiddish poetry, and to what degree it is 92
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still a useful critical category. 7/c
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To a large extent, this is a book about a book: Ezra Korman’s 1928 anthology of women Yiddish poets. In te
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Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology), Korman collected Yiddish poems by seventy 7
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women writers who published between 1586 and 1927. The earliest �gures printed their poems within an 61
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all-encompassing religious context; the poets in the late nineteenth century re�ected the emerging ideas of 4
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Jewish nationhood; and the twentieth-century poets composed in the milieu of radicalism, modernism, and y U
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historical trauma. From Korman’s collection, one might assume that in 1928 women poets held an accepted iv
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place in Yiddish literature. In fact, his volume was the �rst and only collection ever to be compiled in Yiddish rsity
to highlight the work of women poets and to suggest that they wrote within a tradition.5 of N
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In chapter 1, I discuss Korman’s anthology at length and particularly the problems it raises about the idea of rth C
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p. 3 a tradition of women writers in Yiddish. I revise Korman’s premise by showing the many discrete strands ro
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of tradition in which women poets participated. Literary culture in Yiddish was never monolithic, but the a
most prominent and in�uential writers and critics were men; women writing poetry in Yiddish were often - C
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unacknowledged. By studying key women who wrote poetry from many di�erent perspectives, we can better pe
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understand how literary tradition played out its role in modern Yiddish culture. ill L
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The poets I present in this book wrote in a range of styles under many in�uences and on many subjects. Yet ra
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there is much to be gained by looking at how these women poets wrote in Yiddish about the particular s u
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experiences of women and, invariably, about the experiences of Jewish women. Even when some of these er o
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women wrote as though they were not Jewish, they made a statement about Jewishness just by writing in the 2
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Jewish language of Yiddish. S
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In this book, then, I do not try to de�ne a single tradition within these works. Instead, I will show how m
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multiple female voices wrote about being Jewish women poets. If there was a repeated strategy common to r 2
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many, though not all, of these poems, it was the use of “ sacred parody,” a term I have borrowed from David 22
Roskies’s important book, Against the Apocalypse (1984). The classical example of sacred parody in Jewish
literature, both in Yiddish and in Hebrew, is the anti-prayer, that is, a literary work that uses the religious
conventions of prayer to deny the very e�cacy and value of prayer. A writer will thus deny God’s authority
by writing an anti-prayer addressed to that very God. Roskies’s particular interest is the subversive use of D
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sacred parody in Jewish responses to national catastrophe, which deny the very existence of a meaningful n
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tradition by using traditional forms. But women poets use this mode not only subversively but also d
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constructively to reconstitute in a secular literature such devotional traditions as Yiddish tkhines, fro
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supplicatory prayers for women. Poems written in Poland in the 1920s by Kadya Molodowsky, Miriam h
Ulinover, and Roza Yakubovitsh, as well as poems written in America from the late 1940s onward by ttp
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Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman, exemplify the strategy whereby lost or obsolete devotional ://a
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traditions are reclaimed in poems that seem to reject tradition but actually reinvent it. Many of these poems de
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place this dialogue with tradition into the voices of women protagonists, signifying the poets’ interest in the ic
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various ways that gender changes and shapes Jewish poetry. p
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p. 4 However, poems of sacred parody form only one of many threads in the rich tapestry of poetry that women /s
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wrote. Some poets, for example, Rokhl Korn, Celia Dropkin, and Anna Margolin, wrote poetry unconnected nfo
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to sacred parody or, it seems, to any form of traditional Judaism. Korn’s poems of the dorf (country village) -s
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raise issues of class and religious identity by evoking relationships between Christian peasants and the few ho
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Jews who lived among them. Many of Korn’s village poems, as well as her poems of the city, depict rs
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characters who encounter problems particular to women, such as pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, -o
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sisterhood, and abortion. Dropkin’s erotic poems rarely mention Jewish themes or images, much less social lin
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or political issues. But in their unabashed sexual explicitness these poems allude to traditional Jewish /bo
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strictures governing women’s modesty against which Dropkin rebels. When Margolin’s modernist poems /1
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borrow tropes from classical Greek, Roman, and even Christian cultures, the poet often places these 25
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allusions and references within a rhetoric of devotion, whether to pagan deities or to some version of the /ch
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Jewish God. Moreover, these poems repeatedly raise questions about women’s lives, their places in Jewish te
culture, and their forms of creativity. Not all poems written by women can be understood from a single r/17
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perspective. 76
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Over the past twenty-�ve years, many scholars have published studies of poetry in Yiddish by women from b
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a variety of critical perspectives. Building on this earlier work, this book is the �rst to consider a major U
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corpus of women poets, both premodern and modern. Most previous scholarship has focused on women e
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writers in the modern period. The �rst essay published in English on women poets in Yiddish, Norma Fain ity
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Pratt’s overview of the careers of some �fty women writers, appeared in 1980.6 My articles on women poets f N
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began to appear in 1988.7 In 1990 Avraham Novershtern published the �rst serious article on Anna Margolin rth
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as a modernist. Shortly thereafter, two collections—Sokolof, Lerner, and Norich’s Gender and Text in a
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Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (1992) and Baskin’s Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish lin
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Writing (1994)—included essays on women Yiddish poets and writers by Anita Norich, Dan Miron, Janet - C
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Hadda, Norma Fain Pratt, and me, as well as a translation of a 1913 essay by Shmuel Niger.9 Sheva Zucker ap
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published articles on individual women poets between 1991 and 1996.10 In 1994 Irena Klep�sz published two l H
p. 5 important essays that took a feminist critical approach to focus on gender politics in the Yiddish ill L
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language and culture as well as on a number of women prose writers’ involvement in the Bundist, socialist, rarie
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and communist movements before World War II. More recent writers have focused on modernism in the u
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poetry of both Margolin (Barbara Mann and Naomi Brenner) and Rikuda Potash (Yael Chaver); the reception r o
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of the work of Esther Segal and Ida Maze (Rebecca Margolis); and gender and sex in the poetry of Tussman 2
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(Aviva Tal) and Dropkin (Kathryn Hellerstein).12 In subsequent articles of my own, I have considered the S
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poetry of Molodowsky, Ulinover, Yakubovitsh, Korn, and others in the context of Jewish tradition. Works of te
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scholarship that treat female premodern or Old Yiddish writers include Chava Turniansky’s groundbreaking be
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article on the girl-poet Gele (known by only this single name) and her de�nitive critical edition and Hebrew 0
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translation, Glikl: Memoirs 1691–1719, Chava Weissler’s foundational book on the tkhines, Devra Kay’s study
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of a tkhine collection, and Jerold Frakes’s extensive edition of Old Yiddish texts. Neither these works nor
the signi�cant monographs on topics related to women Yiddish writers, both modern and premodern—for
example, Janet Hadda’s psychoanalytic assessment of suicide in Yiddish �ction and Naomi Seidman’s book
on cultural gendering of literature in Hebrew and Yiddish—deal primarily with poetry.14 The eminent books D
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on modernist Yiddish poetry—Ruth Wisse’s A Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988) and Chana Kronfeld’s On n
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the Margins of Modernism (1996)—considered primarily male poets. d
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Perhaps the major achievement in laying groundwork for the reclamation of women Yiddish poets has been m
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the publication of editions of their works, either in translation or in Yiddish, in recent decades: two volumes ttp
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of poems by Rokhl Korn (Generations, edited by Seymour Mayne [1982], and Paper Roses, translated by ://a
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Seymour Levitan [1985]); a scholarly edition of the Yiddish poems of Anna Margolin’s Lider, edited by a
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Avraham Novershtern (1991); English translations of poems by Malka Heifetz Tussman (With Teeth in the m
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Earth, translated by Marcia Falk [1992]); a Yiddish-English bilingual edition of poems by Rukhl Fishman (I .ou
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Want to Fall Like This, translated by Seymour Levitan [1994]); a Yiddish-French bilingual edition of poems .co
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by Celia Dropkin (Dans le vent chaud, translated by Gilles Rozier and Viviane Siman [1994]); my own /s
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p. 6 English-Yiddish bilingual edition of Kadya Molodowsky’s poems (Paper Bridges [1999]); Natalia Krynicka nfo
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and Batia Baum’s bilingual French-Yiddish edition of Miriam Ulinover’s poetry (A grus fun der alter heym: -s
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lider [2003]); Shirley Kumove’s bilingual English-Yiddish edition of Anna Margolin’s poems (Drunk from the ho
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Bitter Truth [2005]); and Goldie Morgentaler’s English edition of Chava Rosenfarb’s selected poems (Exile at rs
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Last [2013]). Along with these books of poetry, four translated collections of Yiddish prose writings by -o
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women have appeared: Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Frieda Forman, Ethel lin
e
Raicus, Sarah Silberstein Swartz, and Margie Wolfe (1994); Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, edited /bo
o
k
by Sandra Bark (2003); Arguing with the Storm, edited by Rhea Tregebov (2008); and The Exile Book of Yiddish /1
9
Women Writers, edited by Frieda Johles Forman (2013). Through their cumulative presence, these disparate 25
7
works of scholarship and translation have given rise to the question of whether or not there actually is a /ch
a
p
tradition of women’s poetry. te
r/1
7
The single attempt to address this question directly is an ambitious, lengthy 2008 essay in Hebrew by 77
6
1
Avraham Novershtern, “The Voices and the Choir: Yiddish Women’s Poetry in the Interwar Period.” In his 6
3
4
essay, Novershtern raises many questions, but for our concerns, the most pertinent is his questioning of the b
y
use of women’s poetry as a critical category. Did this construction mean anything to the women when they U
n
iv
were writing their poetry? Is this category useful today to appreciate and understand the poetry? e
rs
ity
In exploring these questions, Novershtern makes several valuable points. He refutes the idea that women of N
poets were sti�ed or that their writing was suppressed. Indeed, he argues that not only were women not orth
excluded from the Yiddish literary scene but also that their general reception was positive and that women’s C
a
writing contributed to the “the variegated nature of the national literature and culture even though its rolin
15 a
actual dimensions were more modest and limited.” Novershtern also argues that women writers did not - C
view themselves as women writers; and he claims that gender is not a central theme in most women writers’ ha
p
e
poems and that they were more concerned with modernism or politics. In Novershtern’s view, each woman l H
poet was a singular voice that had little in common with that of any other woman poet. Accordingly, he ill L
ib
p. 7 asserts, it is pointless to try to �nd a common denominator among these poets on the basis of gender. In ra
Novershtern’s view, attempts by contemporary feminist scholars to identify a women’s tradition in Yiddish ries
u
poetry only perpetuates the misconceptions and stereotypes held by male Yiddish critics who dismissed se
r o
women writers, an acknowledgment that Novershtern makes, even though he believes that they were n
2
positively received. 0 S
e
p
te
Novershtern is certainly correct that there is no single tradition of women’s Yiddish poetry, no sole common m
b
denominator among women poets, and that the perspective of gender is not the only way to look at these er 2
poets. But the fact that there is not a single rubric for poetry written by women does not mean that looking 02
2
at these poems from a gendered perspective or within the category of women’s experience is not valuable.
The point of literary criticism is not to reduce poetry to a monolithic, quanti�able entity but to reveal its
richness and multiple possibilities. The category of gender is not an end in itself. It is a means to reveal and
discuss di�erence. The real question is not whether there is a single common denominator to all these poets
and their works. Instead, the key question is: What were the many di�erent ways to write about Jewish D
o
w
women’s experiences? n
lo
a
d
e
Novershtern’s assertion that women poets did not regard themselves as such is contradicted by evidence in d
fro
six letters written to Ezra Korman in 1926 and 1927. Responding to Korman’s inquiries or invitations to m
h
submit work to Yidishe dikhterins, the anthology of women poets he was assembling at that time, four poets ttp
s
in Poland (Rokhl Korn, Miriam Ulinover, Roza Yakubovitsh, and Kadya Molodowsky) and two in New York ://a
c
(Malka Lee and Anna Margolin) each expressed an eagerness to participate and revealed her personal a
d
e
acquaintance with the other poets, familiarity with the poetry of other women, and a sense of herself as a m
ic
woman poet.16 .ou
p
.c
o
Novershtern tends to couch his argument in the hierarchical terms of centrality and marginality, of the m
/s
major and the minor, which do not allow for a deep look at the poetry itself. As we all know, margins shift— tan
fo
the major can become the minor, and vice versa. None of these hierarchies is stable. Besides, what is the rd
-s
utility in judging these poems and their place within the larger space of Yiddish poetry before these poems ch
o
have actually been read and studied? Few of them have. The point of this book is to look at as many poems as la
rs
h
p. 8 possible in order to assess the variety and breadth of this corpus of writing in its details. Only when we ip
-o
have a sense of the full range of these poems can we begin to make generalizations about them. As we will n
lin
e
see, women poets did not write exclusively about being women, but they returned repeatedly to the /b
o
experiences of being female and to the problems of expressing these experiences in Yiddish poetry. In this ok
/1
book I describe a world in which women found many di�erent ways to write about themselves. 92
5
7
/c
Although categories of feminist criticism and gender theory have informed my work, this is not a theoretical ha
p
book. Rather, my focus is an extended reading of poems and poets. The book is divided into six chapters, te
r/1
organized both thematically and by individual poets. In each chapter, I address three questions: How did 7
7
7
Yiddish poetry represent and interpret the roles and lifestyles that traditional Judaism assigned to women? 61
6
3
How, in turn, did ideas about women’s sexuality and gender shape poems that women wrote? And, �nally, 4
b
how did the ways that the women writers responded to these questions in their poems change the very y U
n
notion of tradition in modern Jewish literature? iv
e
rs
ity
In chapter 1, “The Idea of a Literary Tradition,” I argue for the centrality of women in the articulation of a o
f N
modern literary tradition of Yiddish writing by American Yiddish poets and critics in the �rst part of the o
twentieth century. This concept of a Yiddish tradition, expressed in literary anthologies and manifestos of rth C
a
literary movements, centers, �rst, on establishing a heritage and historical continuity for Yiddish from the ro
lin
�fteenth or sixteenth century through the twentieth; and, second, on articulating a set of secular literary a
values that are distinct, yet not severed, from religious and folk sources. Through a comparison of two - C
h
a
anthologies—Moyshe Bassin’s Antologye: Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye (Anthology: Five Hundred Years of pe
l H
Yiddish Poetry, 1917) and Ezra Korman’s Yidishe dikhterins (Yiddish Women Poets, 1928)—I maintain that ill L
the idea and the fact of women as writers played a key yet vexed role in the development of the idea of ib
ra
tradition. In a dialogue between these two anthologies, I highlight the ambivalence of Jewish textual rie
s
tradition toward women as sexual beings, women in their demarcated gender roles, and women as readers u
s
e
and writers of Yiddish. The contradictory terms of this ambivalence come into stark contrast within Bassin’s r o
n
p. 9 and Korman’s anthologies, which, although de�ning the historical development of Yiddish poetry and 20
S
attempting to establish a canon, repressed or sequestered writings by women. e
p
te
m
Chapter 2, “Old Poems in a Modern Anthology,” picks up on the assumption initiated by Bassin and b
e
developed by Korman that the modern idea of a Yiddish literary tradition requires an acknowledgment of r 20
2
2
premodern textual roots. Although both anthologists began their collections with devotional poems, dating
back to the �fteenth century (Bassin) and the sixteenth century (Korman), individually they strove to