Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives (S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies)

234 Pages·2007·0.84 MB·English

by  Bluma Goldstein

Enforced Marginality
the s. mark taper foundation
imprint in jewish studies
by this endowment
the s. mark taper foundation supports
the appreciation and understanding
of the richness and diversity of
jewish life and culture
Enforced Marginality
Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives
Bluma Goldstein
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley / Los Angeles / London
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University of California Press
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University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2007 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldstein, Bluma.
Enforced marginality : Jewish narratives on abandoned wives / Bluma
Goldstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-520-24968-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Agunahs. 2. Jewish women—Legal status, laws, etc. 3. Jewish
women in literature. 4. Jewish literature—History and criticism. I. Title.
KBM550.5G65 2007
296.4'444—dc22 2006035371
Manufactured in the United States of America
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fi ber
of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free.
EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of
ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Prologue: Finally Out in the Open xiii
1. Abandoned Wives in Jewish Family Law:
An Introduction to the Agune 1
2. Doubly Exiled in Germany:
Abandoned Wives in Glikl Hamel’s Memoirs
and Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography 10
3. The Victims of Adventure:
Abandoned Wives in Abramovitsh’s Benjamin the Third
and Sholem Aleykhem’s Menakhem-Mendl 49
4. Agunes Disappearing in “A Gallery of Vanished Husbands”:
Retrieving the Voices of Abandoned Women and Children 92
5. An Autobiography of Turmoil:
Abandoned Mother, Abandoned Daughter 130
Epilogue 152
Notes 163
Bibliography 187
Index 199

Acknowledgments
This book took shape over more years than I care to remember. Indeed, I
cannot actually recall when my interest in abandoned wives morphed into
a serious study. At times it seems that I never actually chose to pursue the
subject of abandonment, that instead it chose me and pursued me with a
vengeance. My father deserted my mother and me when I was an infant,
but for half of my life, abandonment was hardly a part of my vocabulary
or concern. In fact, it was only when I began to teach courses with Jewish
content—“Jewish Writers in the German-Speaking World” and “Yiddish
Literature”—and encountered a number of texts about agunes that I be-
gan to take a scholarly interest in the subject. It was certainly discon-
certing to discover how little had been written about agunes, how few
representations of them existed, and how often critics, in writing about
stories of desertion, overlooked the presence of the abandoned wives and
their signifi cance. It was then that I also began to explore the importance
of Jewish family law and Jewish patriarchy for the plight of the agune, as
well as the role of the National Desertion Bureau in tracking down many
thousands of absconding Jewish husbands in the United States of the
twentieth century. Moreover, when I observed how many of the deserted
wives in the texts I examined were intimidated and silent, and also how
many writers—literary critics, historians, sociologists, feminists, and so
on—were silent about the predicament of these women, it seemed neces-
sary for someone to speak when these others could not or did not.
I embarked on this study with two of the more literary chapters—the
autobiographical writings of Glikl Hamel and Solomon Maimon, and
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Eastern European Yiddish novels—primarily because those were texts
I studied in my courses. For the chapter on autobiographical texts, I
had some very useful assistance from a colleague and good friend, and
one of the most eminent and erudite Jewish historians and thinkers, the
late Amos Funkenstein. He read the chapter carefully, argued with me
(very effectively) about Maimon’s writings and intentions, enlightened
me about some of Glikl’s diffi cult Jüdischdeutsch (Old Yiddish) locu-
tions, and made incisive comments and suggestions. Although Amos
was himself a storehouse for an enormous amount of information about
almost everything, and his time was fully occupied—with teaching and
mentoring, researching in many fi elds, and writing—he seemed none-
theless always available for questions and discussion. His untimely death
was shattering for many of us who knew him and often relied on him. He
has a very signifi cant place in my work and my heart.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Chava Turniansky for her seminal
work on Glikl and for her comments on my text. Jordan Finkin’s ex-
tensive linguistic skills proved to be an unexpected blessing. He agreed
to proofread the portion of my writing on Glikl, helped with linguistic
anomalies of Glikl’s text that were especially challenging, and improved
upon my transliterations. Just when I thought that my manuscript was
as it should be, Diane Wolf made a suggestion about reorganizing the
chapter on Glikl, for which I am enormously grateful. Also her remarks
regarding the structure of the family (Diane is a Professor of Sociology
and Jewish Studies) proved very useful, particularly in the chapter on
desertion in the United States.
Jennifer Sylvor’s dissertation work on Sholem Aleykhem’s Menakhem-
Mendl and her exceptional insights into the ways in which variations
in language create characters and contribute to the depiction of the
social milieu informed my understanding of the novel’s economic and
social determinants more than I can say. Robert Peckerar’s comments
about the chapter on the Yiddish novels, which raised many interest-
ing questions about the texts, were instrumental in my rethinking and
reassessing the politics of the texts. Robert (Uri) Alter, a colleague and
longtime friend, read and commented on this chapter, and I thank him
generally for his many insights and particularly for drawing attention to
some of my remarks about the history of the luftmentsh that needed
further investigation and revision. It was in a summer seminar at Yale
with Benjamin Harshav that I fi rst articulated my thoughts about
agunes in writing, and I owe a special debt to Professor Harshav for his
focus on Jewish literary and linguistic concerns in the seminar, which
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
contributed to the direction of my project. Naomi Seidman, who had
once been my student in Berkeley and is now a professor and director
of the Center of Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union,
was also a participant in the seminar, and I cannot express how much
her interest in my work and her remarkably perceptive ideas meant to
me. Since my background is completely secular (in my youth I thought
that Esther, the one biblical book we read in the arbeyter ring shuln
[Workmen’s Circle Yiddish schools] because it contained no mention
of God, was the only book of the Bible), and Naomi was reared in an
intellectually vibrant religious family, she often provided me with valu-
able information about rituals, prayers, and, for me, arcane Judaica that
was absolutely necessary for my work, particularly on The Travels of
Benjamin the Third by Sholem Yakov Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher
Sforim). She has, in addition, been a warm, wonderful, and supportive
friend for many a moon.
Eli Katz and I both came to the Department of German at Berkeley
in the 1960s and remained very close friends and allies these many years.
He was a linguist and a Yiddishist, and his lectures on the history of the
Yiddish language and its literature provided me with an indispensable
treasure trove of information and insights. He had an extraordinary fa-
miliarity with the nuances of the Yiddish language—what was high or
low register; the dialect used and its particular contextual signifi cance;
the political and social implications of linguistic changes in a text—and
a vast knowledge of Yiddish literature from the Middle Ages through
the twentieth century. Eli was always ready to help with diffi culties, to
explain at length the intricacies of a dialogue or turn of phrase in a text,
or to lend me a needed volume unavailable at the library (he possessed
an extensive library of Yiddish language, literary, and reference texts). As
a Germanist I had done virtually no work on Yiddish since my gradua-
tion from mitlshule (Yiddish “after-school” high school) at age thirteen,
and I doubt whether I would have ventured into Yiddish literature had
it not been for my wonderful and intellectually fruitful friendship with
Eli. There is no day when I do not wish he were still here.
My indebtedness to my colleague and very good friend Chana Kron-
feld eludes any language I can muster to express my gratitude for
everything she has done to support me and my work. No matter how
little time she had for herself or her own work, she always found time
and made the effort to read and critique my work in exceptionally care-
ful detail, an act that was, in fact, instrumental in shaping not only
my ideas and arguments but also the structure and methodology of