Literary history and all-encompassing history are so intricately intwined that they cannot be separated. We can see this when trying to understand Jewish women authors in conversation with Jewish history. The gender discrimination that was inherent in Jewish history played directly into the discrimination that women authors faced in the twentieth century. Using 1920 as an inflection point, it seems that pre-1920 Jewish women were not accepted as credible authors at all, but post-1920 Jewish women were considerably more successful when writing poetry than prose.

Even though Europe women writers began to have a presence in the literary sphere before 1920, Jewish women still struggled to gain audiences for their work. In “Why Was There No Women’s Poetry Before 1920?” by Dan Miron, he sites that Hebrew and Yiddish poetry was not included in publications because of how discriminating editors and the public were against women writers. After 1920, though, Miron claims that there was a change in wind. Suddenly, the wall hiding women writers was brought down, and women’s poetry took center stage, according to hi, though, “misogyny and male chauvinism are not the issue here” (70). This argument seems invalid though, as once publishing women’s writings became a “trend,” men like Yankev Glatshteyn had to use a feminine pseudonym in order to have his work published. If the terms of publishing were based on quality not gender, Glatshteyn should have been able to publish his work no matter what gendered name was on the byline.

After 1920, when women started rising up in the literary field, there was still a sense of divide between men and women authors, given an interesting tension between poetry and prose for women. In “Jewish Literatures and Feminist Criticism: An Introduction to Gender and Text” by Anita Norich, she says that women were more successful writing poetry than prose because, “in Hebrew or Yiddish, with their connections to a Jewish story-telling tradition in Bible, Aggadah and Midrash—traditions that denied women for the most part—prose may indeed appear more characteristically as a masculine genre in ways that are not true of other cultures” (12). Norich says that while in other traditions women were the messengers of oral tradition, Jewish women were excluded from the oral tradition. Therefore, storytelling was not accessible for women. Just as women were traditionally excluded from being storytellers, contemporary Jewish women writers were not storytellers, they were poets. Norich also says that storytelling, “implies…a kind of rootedness in culture which, for Jews in general and still more recently for Israelis, has been remarkably different for men and women” (11). The divide between men and women in Jewish culture influenced the divide between men and women authors because women were not particularly accepted in every literary genre. The gender divide that has been a condition in Jewish history has steered women’s literary history, presenting challenges and obstacles that, thankfully, women have been able to overcome.

For a tremendous period of time, the realm of writing was reserved for male members of society.  Men are dominant in modernity, which closes this particular field off from women’s participation – women can’t possibly be as successful at writing as men are.  Social construction of gender roles, however, has not always looked this way.

In her work Gender Roles and Women’s “Window of Opportunity,” Iris Parush discusses the gendered structure of Jewish society in nineteenth century Eastern Europe.  There, men were focused on spiritual endeavors, which left the work of home-keeping to their wives.  Due to different educational backgrounds, only women had the foreign language skills that enabled them to work with non-Jewish customers.  As a result, they had a greater impact on the surrounding society, and the phenomenon of women as breadwinners permeated their neighboring cultures.  Both by their status as the family’s breadwinner and through their impact in the public sphere, Jewish women in this period inhabited hyper-masculine roles in society.

Parush also explores the trope of reversed gender roles in the context of maskilic literature, which positions the husband as unproductive and the wife as the “optimally positioned figure” in society.  This situation is ironic and comical, but more importantly it’s based on on the presumption of certain stereotypes of masculinity and femininity; the roles are simply reversed.  The prevalence of this phenomenon in maskilic literature gave exposure to the idea of reversed gender roles, however comical it was meant to be.

Expression through writing – especially through poetry – is emotional, and therefore feminine (according to normative associations of gender roles).  Jewish women’s position as breadwinner in Eastern Europe and the exposure in maskilic literature to reversed gender roles combined to make writing – a field only occupied by men for a long period of time - gradually more accessible for women.  They could access the emotional element, and were simply reclaiming what was ‘naturally’ theirs.  Of course, women entering the realm of writing was not a simple feat, but these two phenomena of exposure to masculinized women helped them through the fight for recognition.  Consequently, women’s writing is inherently wrapped up in the themes of reversed gender roles.

Parush, Iris. “Gender Roles and Women’s “Window of Opportunity”.” Reading Jewish women: marginality and modernization in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press ;, 2004. 38-56. Print.

During our recent exploration of the poetry of Esther Raab, and her spectacular vocabulary of landscape, as well as her perceived nativeness, I was reminded of an article read long ago.  The article was a review of how Hebrew came to be revived as a living language, and included the following story: The American Yiddish poet Yehoash, on a visit to Palestine, saw a nameless teenage girl (presumably a native Hebrew speaker) sitting by her garden.  “He asked her in Hebrew: ‘What is the name of these flowers?’ To which she replied: ‘Flowers have no names.’” (Harshav, 27.)  Less than 10 years later, Raab was naming her garden, and by 1929, Uriah Feldman had published a botany book for Hebrew speakers. (B. Mann. “Framing the Native: Esther Raab’s Visual Poetics,” 239)  Neither of those accomplishments are mentioned in the short, evocative article from 2009.

In the 19th century, Hebrew was not a native language.  (I did not appreciate this fact when my grandmother insisted that some fellow named Mapu was not only related to us, but was significant for writing the first Hebrew language novel.)  The push for Hebrew to be the new Jewish national language was a concerted, artificial effort, much like the effort to conquer the natural landscape. (Mann, 238.)  The ideal for the new Jew was someone who was strong, self-governing and ruler of the natural world.  This Jew’s parallel was not the contrasting old Jew, but the complementary  land, waiting for him to come to her.  The land has a feminized persona, corresponding to Hebrew’s gendered vocabulary; she plays the muse to Zionist hero (who is now revealed to be male).

Esther Raab, of course, complicates this.  In her interviews, she promoted herself as the quintessential Hebrew native, and she certainly comes across that way in her poetry.  She plays with language, using obscure words and made up forms.  She uses biblical allusion, but does not rely on yeshivish scholarship.  Her poetry is not only sensual, it is strikingly homoerotic (as noted in Mann, 244.).  Her land is drenched with milk, her land experiences torrential blossoming, and at the same time, it has rebellious feet and a skinny chest.  Raab was working on multiple fronts: to prove her nativeness, to prove Hebrew’s nativeness to the land, and, of course, as we’ve seen over and over, to assert her place in the heavenly host of Hebrew poets.  And how better to accomplish those things than to name the flowers.

Works cited:

Benjamin Harshav, “Flowers Have no Names.” Natural History 118:1 (2009), pp. 24-29.

Barbara Mann, “Framing the Native: Esther Raab’s Visual Poetics,” Israel Studies 4:1 (1999) 234-57.

There is no denying that historical circumstances bear heavily on literary and other cultural output. Whatever the condition of the Jewish experience was in any given location at any given time had an impact on what sort of writing was produced and by whom. Dan Miron* delves deep into the question of why there was no women’s Hebrew poetry that entered the mainstream before 1920. This is a very specific question that brings to the surface many others: What is happening in the world of Hebrew poetry in particular at that time? What is the experience of Jewish women at that time? And why was there a sudden shift after 1920?

Miron considers many of the circumstances that shaped the Jewish experience during that time. He mentions the different relationship to Yiddish (the Mamaloshen) and Hebrew (the language of tradition) that many women might have experienced (though he debunks this theory by highlighting the equal access to education in Eretz Israel and the fact that women were writing Hebrew prose throughout this time), as well as the changes in the political landscape in the Soviet Union and the Land of Israel. Yet, these explanations are insufficient, which he notes.

Miron’s analysis points to what I think is a common error made in using history to analyze a phenomenon. Too often, we look at the news-worthy and “textbook” large-scale events- wars, political regimes, economic conditions, etc.- to explain what we have observed. However, as Miron astutely realizes, sometimes a seemingly small symptom or by-product of that large-scale event is in fact the cause we are looking for.

In describing the phenomenon of Jewish women’s poetry emerging in only two of the 5-6 areas in which Jewish women’s writing was proliferating, he explains that “both locations [Eretz Yisrael and the Soviet Union] were characterized by a period of stormy upheaval and by ideologies supporting liberation for the oppressed. This atmosphere coincided with a weakening of the old hierarchies in the literary establishment.” (p. 66) This upheaval signifies a massive change in the Jewish experience, yet, as an explanation, it is incomplete. It does not help to answer all of the questions raised above.

To answer those questions, we have to dig deeper. Miron does so, realizing that this transformation of the Jewish experience resulted in pushback against the Bialik-established, dominating mode of Jewish poetry. Women were not expressing themselves according to his standards (expression the personal through the national experience, and a densely layering culture and tradition in its style, Miron, 73), and thus were effectively silenced during this era. “Only when this star dimmed,” according to Miron (90), when Bialik’s influence began to wane, could women begin to be heard, and this happened as a result of the questioning and challenging of old norms that emerged from the changes that happened in the places in which these writers lived.

*Miron, Dan. “Why was there no women’s poetry in Hebrew before 1920?” in Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature. (As cited in the syllabus)

Dan Miron’s essay, Why Was There No Women’s Poetry in Hebrew Before 1920 explores how women’s poetry in Hebrew emerged into the literary sphere between 1920 and 1922. One of the interesting aspects of his introduction explains that women in European literatures were writing, but were mostly engaged in the pursuit of fiction. But in 1920, Rahel Blaustein, Esther Raab, Elisheva Zirkova-Bikhovsky and Yocheved Bat-Miriam were all received as writers, and Miron explains a few reasons why this was specifically the time when women’s poetic voices were heard. One was a “revolutionary social ambience [which] encouraged the literary expression of cultural elements that until then has been marginalized or silent,” and these expressions came specifically in “the Soviet Union (after the October Revolution) and Eretz Yisrael (at the height of the Third Aliyah)” (Miron, Why Was There No Women’s Poetry in Hebrew Before 1920, p.66). Both of these created major social change and allowed for a different kind of expression; both of these movements galvanized around liberation of the oppressed and created social avenues for women’s voices to be heard. Miron writes that these movements happened simultaneously as older models of literary greatness were weakening, which mandated a new form (or gender) of literary expression, paving the way for these great women writers (Miron, p.69). What I find most interesting about this approach is understanding, from a historical perspective, that societies had to be broken down, altered, or re-shaped in order to make way for women’s voices. It wasn’t simply that women could enter into the discourse with their poetry, but these revolutions reframed both the poets’ and the readers’ ability to see who could be a part of the canon in a different way because they changed their societies at large. Essentially, something had to be destroyed and built up in a new way to allow women’s poetry to emerge.

Frustrating about Miron’s work is his refusal to attribute the lack of women’s writing to misogyny and male chauvinism. He writes, “editors would have welcomed a woman poet had one sent them work that could meet the standards of their poetics. Such texts were not submitted, whether because the women who tried to write could not conform to the norms of reigning tastes, or because an atmosphere was created in Hebrew literature which dissuaded women from even attempting to stand the test and brave the criticism” (Miron, p.70). Here, he seems to indicate that it had nothing to do with the historical times (which misogyny and can be a part of), yet the women of the times weren’t talented enough writers to pass the test. While I’m not a literary historian by any means, this seems like a gross misunderstanding of oppression (even if subtle!) of women.

The social and literary developments within the Jewish community during the 19th and early 20th century reveal the writings and poetry of women of time would have been educated and well written, but simply did not fit the social literary atmosphere of the time.  Thus, for the entire 19th century and first twenty years of the 20th century, women were largely unable to express themselves in the existing Hebraic literary cannon.  Furthermore, for those educated daring women who felt they could insert themselves into the Hebraic literary cannon, they often were marginalized at the time and later excluded from the history of Hebrew poetry.  In other words, though women were educated, female poetic writing was hardly present in the 19th and early 20th century, but made an emergence in the early 1920s.

In Iris Parush’s piece “Gender Roles and Women’s Window of Opportunity” she explains Jewish women in the 19th century were the breadwinners of the family unit, “permitting them to learn foreign languages, to acquire secular education, and to receive exposure to modernity” (Parush 39).  For centuries before and continuing throughout the 19thcentury, the societal expectations for Jewish men were for them to learn Torah and Talmud.  Therefore, with the “economic duress” of the 19th century women were looked to provide doubly for their families, filling the role of both the housewife and more importantly the breadwinner.  Consequently, women needed to be educated to be successful professionally, creating for them a “window of opportunity” (Parush).  Nevertheless, though women were educated, they still were unable to insert themselves into the Hebraic literary cannon in the 19th and early 20th century due to literary environment.  However, though this is true for the 19th and early 20th century, perhaps it this opportunity of education that allowed women to enter the Hebraic literary cannon in the 1920s.

In Dan Miron’s essay “Why Was There No Women’s Poetry in Hebrew Before 1920?” he argues women’s poetry in Hebrew emerged in the 1920s due to the “profound change in the relation of the literature and the culture as a whole to poetic language” (Miron 70).  With the “weakening of the old hierarchies in the literary establishment,” namely “Bialik’s poetics,” the literary atmosphere evolved, allowing the themes and styles of female poetics to be included into the Hebraic literary cannon (Miron 66).  Thus, the inability for women to have their voices heard in the 19th and early 20th century was not due to “misogyny and male chauvinism,” Miron argues, but rather was because the thematic mediums of female poetic expression did not fit the literary establishment of the time (Miron 70).  However, once the literary atmosphere evolved, educated women were then able to join the Hebraic literary cannon.

Jewish literary history has long viewed itself in conversation with traditional gender roles found throughout Jewish history. These gender roles have changed over time, influenced particularly by the intersection of traditional Judaism, its accompanying way of life, and modernity. One might assume that the historical positioning of women in the domestic sphere limited women’s engagement with literature; however, in her article “Gender Roles and Women’s “Window of Opportunity””, Parush suggests that the situation was more complicated. Traditionally, a sharp divide existed between the gendered roles of Jewish men and women. In explanation, Parush quotes Mendele the Bookseller, writing, “the woman…takes care of this-worldly affairs, and the husband worships the Lord and takes care of the affairs of the world to come” (38). However, she argues that women’s positions as the keepers of the home and “this-wordly affairs” ultimately opened a ‘window of opportunity’ that made women’s engagement with literature possible. She writes that the advent of modernity, with its cross-cultural connections in the marketplace, “[permitted women] to learn foreign languages, to acquire a secular education, and to receive an exposure to modernity” (Parush 39). This exposure to modernity gave women a unique position in Jewish history. Despite her nonexistent formal religious education, a woman could find herself in control of several languages, savvy with money, and able to make decisions about her own life. Thus, Jewish women (although Parush, here, is perhaps lacking in her discussion of women of different socio-economic backgrounds) could serve as the facilitators for the entrance of modernism into the Jewish home, a role that Jewish men were certainly not expected to adopt.

So, what role does this ‘window of opportunity’ play in Jewish literary history? As modernity came knocking and women had acquired real world skills and exposure, the door opened wider for women authors to make themselves known. This was particularly true in the land of Israel; Zionism’s purported egalitarianism, paired with the feminization of men who pursue intellectual over physical pursuits, created a prime environment for poets like Esther Raab to emerge. The combination of new opportunities for women writers within an old framework, however, can trigger what authors Gilbert and Gubar call ‘the anxiety of influence’ in their essay “Infection in the Sentence: the Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship”. This phenomenon is described as an internal recognition that literary texts are inherently connected, perhaps dangerously so, with their authors. This encourages a fear of writing and creating as the ultimate destruction, specifically in women; because there was no significant literary tradition of Jewish women authors, the pioneering female authors faced an entirely new realm within literary history.

This is not to say that the literary and social world was immediately ready for the entrance of women poets; far from it. Patriarchal hegemony in the literary field was not immediately reversed; women poets still faced exclusion from the Hebrew literary canon. Dan Miron, in his article “Why Was There No Women’s Poetry in Hebrew Before 1920?”, writes “the discrimination, if it existed, was not in the ill will of the literary establishment. Instead it manifested itself in the cultural and aesthetic tastes, and in the norms and restrictions these determined” (Miron, 70). Michael Gluzman argues against Miron, ultimately claiming that whether or not the exclusion was intentional is irrelevant; women authors faced explicit barring from the literary canon. In the end, examining gender history within Jewish history can be a useful tool in understanding women’s roles in literary history.